Category: Education

What to Do When Your Child is Failing School

What to Do When Your Child is Failing School

Nothing is more stressful than finding out that your kid has failed school. Despite learning something, it feels like a year’s worth of effort and time wasted. And the shame accompanying the incident is even more difficult to handle. But, if the year hasn’t come to an end, there’s still time. You can do a lot to help your child. Read more to know exactly what!

Understand Why Your Child is Failing

According to a reputable Math tutor, the first thing any parent should do is identify the root of the problem. What is causing your child to fail at school?

If you know what is troubling your child, you can find ways to solve it and get your child back on track before the academic session ends. Here are a few common reasons why kids fail school:

  • Difficult Studies

Mathematical concepts and physics theories become difficult with time. It’s impossible to deny this fact. And this is not because the school wants your child to fail (trust us, they haven’t bewitched the curriculum so that no child passes!).

It’s because every child has a different pace of learning. Some kids are born with high intellect, while some improve it as they grow up. The latter has to adopt a growth mindset and work consistently to compete with naturally intelligent ones.

So, it’s okay if your child finds the studies too challenging. With a little assistance, he will improve too, and perform better.

  • Lack of Motivation & Confidence

Some children simply don’t have the motivation and willpower to study anything at school. They will engage in daydreaming and zoning out. At times, they would forget their learning supplies and make excuses to go out of class.

Meanwhile, some children are willing to study. But when confusion strikes them, they don’t have enough confidence to consider their query valid and ask it. They’re afraid to look dumb and wrong in front of their teachers.

  • Personal Issues

Disturbing home conditions and peer pressure are some other reasons why a child might fail school. These events deviate the attention of the child from studies to internal conflicts. He feels anxious, stressed, and distressed.

  • Underlying Mental Health Concerns

Mental health issues are becoming increasingly common today. These include depression, anxiety, and even ADHD. Since these problems don’t have physical symptoms, it’s hard to diagnose them. Poor academic performance can be a consequence of these issues.

Discuss the Matter With Your Child

The second step in understanding your child’s problems is to discuss the matter with him directly. Remember that a doctor isn’t able to provide a diagnosis unless the patient tells him the symptoms and issues.

So, to make your analysis correct, speak to your child and listen to what he thinks is the problem. But be a little careful in how you ask the questions. Don’t ask why questions, instead ask what questions.

The why questions invite your child to make excuses and give incorrect explanations for their behavior. And there’s nothing to blame them for. Chances are that they don’t understand why this is happening to them either.

Get In Touch With School Teachers

Once you’ve discussed this with the child, contact the school teachers and staff privately. It’s best if the matter is completely hidden from your child or his peers. Otherwise, he might feel embarrassed by the whole affair.

Investigate the problem further with the teachers. Ask them about the child’s behavior and actions. Does he miss classes on purpose? Are his friends being a bad influence?

Find Suitable Solutions

By now, you should have a clear picture of the cause behind your child failing school. It’s time to find a suitable solution. A few suggestions include:

  1. Seek external support – if your child is struggling with difficult subjects, enroll him in a tuition academy. These extra classes will give your child the individual attention and help needed.
  2. Adopt a positive attitude towards studies – children behave how we teach them to behave. If your child is slacking on studies because it makes him appear cool or he thinks they are unnecessary, it’s better to fix your attitude first. Show your kid how academics are useful in daily life like math is important for finance management.
  3. Encourage the effort – teach your child that things can change with the right efforts and approach. Not everyone is born intelligent, but there is always room for growth.
  4. Explore new strategies for learning – speak with teachers about ways to implement ways to help your child overcome obstacles and monitor their academic progress.
  5. Consult a medical professional – if none of the problems seem to justify the failing grades, visit an expert to check for mental health concerns.

Be Gentle, Be Patient!

Last but most importantly, be gentle and patient with your child. Failing school is not the end of the world. Instead of pressurizing your child to do better, help them figure out the problem and fix it together.

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How to Write Learning Objectives

How to Write Learning Objectives

A learning objective is a clear statement that describes what the learner will attain or apply from a lesson. Writing learning objectives is important for any lesson-planning process. The well-written learning objectives help students to understand what they will learn after completing the course or session.

Learning objectives assist to focus the learning process and provide a clear framework for assessment. It ensures that the learning activities are aligned with the goals of the lesson or course. After defining the specific skills or knowledge that learners are going to acquire, instructors can prepare the appropriate content for the course.

This article will take you through the importance of learning objectives and the ways to write them perfectly.

Why Effective Learning Objectives Are Important?

Well-written learning objectives are important for many reasons such as;

Clear Roadmap for Students

Learning objectives provide a clear picture of the course to the students shortly what they will learn from the lesson. This shows how it’s well-aligned with the goals of the course. It inspires and motivates the participants on achieving those outcomes. This also helps them understand how they will be assessed.

Compass for Teachers

Good learning objectives help teachers and instructors to design the right course contents and strategies that cope with the learning objectives. This aids them to make a fair assessment plan too.  Learning the importance of observation is just as essential.

Things to Consider Before You Write the Learning Objectives

A good teacher or course instructor always thinks a lot before designing the learning objectives. Some of the questions that they might ask themselves for writing beneficial learning objectives are;

  • What will the students or participants attain after attending this course, or lesson?
  • What do the participants need to know and how it will bridge their existing knowledge and skills with what they are going to achieve?
  • How do participants apply the knowledge and skills that they will learn?

Step-by-Step Guide to Write Learning Objectives

The effective learning objective should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). If you are a teacher or want to be so, you can follow the steps below to write the learning objectives perfectly.

Step 1: Clear Statement

Write each learning objective in a clear statement of what the attendees will know after participating in the lesson. For example, you can start with the phrase “After completing this session, the learner will be able to …..”

  • Be sure to include the necessary context and conditions for the learning objective.
  • The objectives should describe what the attendees will learn or do as a result of a learning experience.
  • Keep the learning objective concise and student-focused. Avoid using vague or broad language.

Step 2: Use Most Suitable Action Verb

Choose the right action verbs that are specific, measurable, and descriptive. This makes the objective clearer and more focused. For writing learning objectives, it’s recommended to follow Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956).

Bloom’s hierarchical classification explains six different levels of thinking: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. AAMC.org enlisted some verbs to formulate educational objectives.

Step 3: Break Down the Tasks and Cognitive Skills

Sometimes faculty think the lesson or task requires specific skills but in reality, it needs a blend of many component skills. To master these skills, students have to practice a lot. The course instructor should mention all the necessary skills so participants get the right direction at the very beginning.

Step 4: Review Each Objective

Double-check the learning objective to ensure that it matches the overall goals and objectives of the course or lesson. It should be closely related to the content and activities that will be covered in the lesson.

Learning Objective Examples

How to Write Learning Objectives

A learning objective for a science lesson on plant biology might be: “After completing this session, the learner will be able to identify the different parts of a plant and their functions, using a diagram or a real plant as a reference.”

This objective is specific (identifying the parts of a plant), measurable (using a diagram or a real plant), attainable (assuming the learner has some prior knowledge of plant biology), relevant (to the topic of plant biology), and time-bound (able to do this after completing the lesson).  So, it meets the SMART formula hence the learning objective is absolutely accurate.

But if you use “learn” instead of “identify” the learning objective will be wrong as the word “learn” is not measurable.

Conclusion

Learning objectives are crucial components of any educational program or lesson plan. They help to ensure that the content and activities of a lesson are focused, relevant, and aligned with the course’s or program’s overall goals and objectives.

The well-written learning objectives will help to design the content that copes with the learning programs and assessment process. We describe here the steps to make effective learning objectives. Hopefully, you can now write the learning objectives perfectly.

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Why Students Prefer Visual Learning While Studying

Student Studying Online

Visual content has grown increasingly significant in all aspects of human life in the contemporary era. Because 65 percent of individuals learn best through visuals, they are vital for eLearning courses. By diving into important statistics and facts, this will investigate why students prefer visual learning when studying.

Memory For Visuals Tends To Be Quite Robust

Associating ideas with concrete visuals is a simple but effective strategy for helping students remember what they’ve learned. Students are more likely to retain information presented visually because they are able to make more sense of it and focus more intently on it. Studies have shown that after three days, people only remember 10% to 20% of what they read or hear, but they recall over 65% of what they see.

Visuals Are Far More Efficient At Conveying Meaning Than Words

Having the data laid out in bullet points makes them much easier to read and absorb. The same data, presented as a picture or video, is processed much more rapidly. Our eyes can detect 36,000 visual signals every hour, while the brain can process pictures lasting just 13 milliseconds, as reported by Visual Teaching Alliance. Within a tenth of a second, our brains can process enough visual information to form an overall impression of a situation. Images can be processed 60,000 times faster than words by the human brain.  Since visual learning is so important to them, osmosis is one of the best online learning platform for medicine currently available.

Stimulates Students’ Curiosity

Have you ever noticed how much more engaging a lecture gets when the speaker incorporates a humorous image onto the board? Text-only classroom lectures might be dull for some students. Studying using visuals can be a lot of fun and a really intriguing experience. Including images in your notes is one way to make even the most boring lectures more interesting. Using visual aids such as pictures, colors, and sketches helps learners stay interested and concentrated.

Improve Your Capacity For Higher-Level Reasoning

When dealing with complex or text-heavy subjects, visual aids like diagrams and infographics can be invaluable. Including images in notes helps us retain information because it engages our imagination. In addition, when we put our minds to the task of translating words into pictures, we exercise our higher-order cognitive processes.

Visuals Can Facilitate Faster Learning

According to research, seeing something helps our brain digest it more quickly than reading words. It’s easier and quicker to absorb data presented in visual formats like flowcharts, graphs, symbols, etc. Having something to look at may help us remember and understand concepts more thoroughly. Visuals like pictures are kept in our long-term memory, although our short-term memory can only hold a tiny amount of information. Words are difficult to recall because they are abstract and complicated, and our brains are wired to prefer pictures. Consider how quickly your mind can conjure up a logo for any brand, even before you can remember the name of the brand itself.

The Bottom Line

A visual system is a powerful tool for education. Most individuals can recall any information presented to them in a visual style. Do you learn best by reading about something, or would you rather have it demonstrated in an image or video? Since pictures are more appealing than written information, most individuals would choose the latter option.

The Ultimate Guide to Easily Make Instructional Videos

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4 Reasons Why Students Struggle With Math

Young Student Struggles with Math

Almost all students have a least one subject that they consider to be their least favorite. While this subject will vary from student to student, the one that most kids tend to hate is math. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Math is one of the more difficult subjects early on in school, and it doesn’t really get easier.

However, the difficulty isn’t the only reason students struggle with math, in particular. There are usually other explanations as to why this is. In this article, we will go over those reasons so that you can better adapt your teaching strategy to account for them.

Learning Disabilities

One thing that many schools have become much better about these days is acknowledging any learning disabilities a student might have and making adjustments for them. Things such as autism or ADD/ADHD are well-known problems that can make learning math more difficult for some students, but dyslexia is another one.

Most of the time, dyslexia makes reading more difficult for children, but it can also happen with numbers. In fact, some students might only have dyslexia with numerical values and not letters, making it harder to detect. Regardless of what learning disabilities, your students may face, changing the way you teach to accommodate them is crucial for their success.

Lack of Patience or Concentration

Not all mental struggles come from learning disabilities, though. Many young children struggle with common concepts such as patience and concentration. Kids can work on and develop these traits as they get older, but in the meantime, they will struggle with their math studies if they lack either of them.

That means, on top of finding new ways to help your students master math, you should also figure out how to help them improve these traits. Not every day needs to be a math lesson. Taking the time to help students develop their patience and concentration will go a long way.

Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain

Of course, one of the more well-known reasons why some students struggle with math is because they are right-brained people. Those who use more right-brained thinking are those who are creative and expressive. Math is very straight to the point and analytical, something that comes more naturally to left-brained individuals.

In order to combat this, you should try to find ways to inject creativity into your lessons. Maybe you design a project around a complex topic or come up with problems that are more stimulating to right-brained people. The choice is up to you.

Math Anxiety

Finally, we have math anxiety. Sometimes, the thought of having to do math will stress kids, teens, and even adults out and cause them to struggle even more than before. This problem can be made worse by all of the previously mentioned difficulties. It can also be hard to identify, but once you know how to recognize and overcome math anxiety, you will be able to help a lot of students do much better with this troublesome subject.

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