Assessing and Helping Challenging Students: Part One, Why Do Some Students Have Difficulty Learning?

When students struggle with routine assignments and fall behind classmates, a busy teacher may pigeonhole them as slow, give up on them, or become frustrated from failed efforts to bring them up to speed. Well‐intentioned efforts to help struggling students by providing repetitions of the same experiences may fail because the specific cause of the sub‐par performance was not identified. Six potential causes of inadequate student performance can serve as a diagnostic framework to help teachers pinpoint why a student is struggling academically: 1) cognitive factors, including poorly integrated, compartmentalized information, poor metacognition that hinders the student's ability to monitor and self‐correct performance, bona fide learning disabilities that require professional assessment and treatment, and sensory‐perceptual difficulties that may hinder performance in certain health care disciplines; 2) ineffective study habits, which are more common among professional students than faculty realize; 3) an inadequate educational experience (unclear objectives, poorly organized instruction, absence of coaching and timely feedback) or a punitive environment in which students avoid approaching instructors for assistance; 4) distraction due to nonacademic issues such as social relationships, health of a spouse, or employment; 5) dysfunctional levels of defensiveness that hinder student‐teacher communication; and 6) underlying medical conditions that may affect student attentiveness, motivation, energy, and emotional balance. The objective of this article is to help faculty recognize potential underlying causes of a student's learning problems. Strategies for helping the academically struggling student are also introduced for several of these etiologies.