Summer is a common time to seek the help of a reading tutor or general academic tutor. Students often lose skills they gained during the school year if they do not stay connected to it. However, is tutoring the best option for your child this summer?
Tutoring Year-After-Year
If your child needs to participate in tutoring or summer school every summer, it may be time to consider a different approach – an approach that identifies why they need regular tutoring in the first place!
For kids who need consistent tutoring, there is often a combination of cognitive skills weaknesses at the root of their difficulties – be it with reading, math, attention or executive function. Tutoring can help keep them in the subject matter, but it typically focuses on addressing the symptoms of the difficulty, not the root cause.
For example, if a child struggles to read, tutoring provides more reading practice. If a child struggles with math facts, tutoring focuses on more repetition to drill them into memory. If a child struggles with executive function, tutoring may provide coaching to recommend strategies to improve this. However, none of this activity is considering why the student struggles in the first place. If you are focused on tutoring and not the root cause, why would these difficulties improve?
LearningRx is Different from Tutoring
LearningRx Savage is different from tutoring. We start with a cognitive skills assessment which identifies the root cause of the difficulty and then create a personalized training program to address these areas. What does it look like to address the root cause?
The Root Cause of Reading Struggles
For students who struggle with reading fluency, decoding or reading comprehension, or are diagnosed with dyslexia, the root cause usually relates to poor auditory processing and memory. Auditory processing is the ability to segment and blend sounds, critical for decoding. Memory is needed to retain all the strange rules and exceptions in our language. Without strong memory, students struggle to recognize words. This can start with sight words and then become a difficulty with non-phonetic words that require memory to recognize the word and rule.
LearningRx has recent peer-reviewed research demonstrating the significant gains our clients achieve in our reading intervention.
The Root Cause of Attention Difficulties
If your child has general attention difficulties or is diagnosed with ADHD, their attention issue is usually a symptom of other weaknesses. Research published in the Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psychology reveals that cognitive skills including processing speed, auditory memory and working memory can drive attention difficulties. For example, when a child has slow processing, their brain must work much harder to keep up or complete an academic task making them prone to zone out or become distracted. Strengthening these root cause weaknesses has improved attention for many of our clients, including Connor.
Maybe It’s Time to Try Something New
Rather than enroll your child in tutoring, maybe it’s time to take a new approach, an approach that addresses the root cause. After this summer, maybe your child won’t need tutoring year-after-year.
Call LearningRx Savage to schedule an assessment to see why your child is caught in the cycle of constant academic catch-up and tutoring! It’s time to break the cycle.
Results are from past clients. You or your loved ones may or may not achieve the same outcomes, but you can learn more about our research and results here.