Make This Your Last Bad Report Card

Report cards. Seldom have two words caused such anxiety for both students and parents.  For some, report cards come with feelings of inadequacy and fears about the future. But brain research has given hope to those who dread report cards, because we now know why many students struggle in school.  The most common cause of poor academic performance is not laziness, nor is it ineffective parenting or teaching. In fact, most underperforming students are suffering from one or more cognitive skill weaknesses.

What are cognitive skills?

Cognitive skills are the underlying mental skills that allow us all to think, learn, reason, remember, and pay attention.  They include skills such as memory, attention, processing speed, logic and reasoning, and visual and auditory processing.  If mental skills are strong, learning comes easily and naturally.  If skill weaknesses remain hidden, a student will often face chronic learning, reading and performance struggles.

While we don’t always know why an individual has cognitive skill weaknesses, we do know that cognitive skills can be strengthened.  And because 80% of learning difficulties are caused by cognitive skill weaknesses, most struggling students can learn faster, more easily, and more efficiently by strengthening their cognitive skills.

How can cognitive skills be strengthened?

Much like the muscles of the body, cognitive skills are strengthened by exercise.  Cognitive skills training (also known as “brain training”) uses intensive, one-on-one mental exercises to tackle the source of learning struggles and fix them with permanent solutions.  When the brain is forced to perform a difficult skill, it builds new synapses (pathways).  The more synapses the brain has for a certain skill (such as working memory), the more quickly and easily it can use this skill in the future.

Could cognitive skills training help me?

Brain training can help to rectify all learning disabilities, such as dyslexia (“trouble with words”), ADD, ADHD, dyscalculia (“trouble with numbers”), and autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome.  In fact, because brain training treats the root cause – not the symptoms – of learning struggles, it can make anyone a stronger learner.  Students who are performing well in school utilize cognitive training to give them an edge in standardized tests, and adults who want to improve their memory or combat age-related decline have found success with brain training as well.  Just as anyone can improve their physical fitness with exercise, anyone can improve their cognitive abilities through brain training.

While brain training is most effective when conducted by a Certified Cognitive Skills Trainer at a brain training center, there are plenty of activities you can do at home to improve your child’s cognitive skills!  Here are some games you can play with your children to help enhance their cognitive skills:

• Bop-It Extreme (improves Auditory Processing, Processing Speed, and Selective Attention)

• Perfection (strengthens Long-Term Memory, Numerical Fluency, and Visual Processing)

• Scrabble (exercises Problem Solving, Simultaneous Processing, and Word Attack)

• Simon (improves Processing Speed, Deductive and Inductive Reasoning, and Math Computation)

• Tetris (enhances Logic and Reasoning, Planning, and Short-Term Memory)

Make this your child’s last bad report card!  To have your child’s cognitive skills assessed and uncover the underlying causes of their learning struggles, call a LearningRx Brain Training Center at 770-47-LEARN (Alpharetta-Johns Creek) or 404-25-BRAIN (Atlanta-Buckhead).