Steps To Take if You Feel Your Child Is Falling Behind in School

As the spring semester unfolds and the end of the school year approaches, many students find themselves struggling or falling behind as they try to balance increasing demands. Emily Mitchell, vice president of education at Sylvan Learning, has some insights on gauging how well your children are doing in class and offers some steps that you can take to support their success through the end of the school year.

“If you think that your child might be struggling, consider reaching out to their teacher,” she said. “You can ask about what they’re seeing in class and what you may be able to do at home. Oftentimes, they can tell you exactly what your student is struggling with, and they can suggest a few solutions that you can begin to work on at home.”

Mitchell noted that, at times, there may be a bit of a personality conflict between the student and their teacher causing additional friction. In cases like these, the school guidance counselor can be a wonderful resource who can provide more information regarding supplemental support during or after the school day. A counselor may also be able to provide additional ideas on how a student, parent and teacher might work together to support growth.

Considering Other Circumstances

If a teacher or guidance counselor can’t identify any specific learning challenges, speaking with your student about their experience in school and observing academic habits at home is a great place to start. For example, if a child’s backpack is disorganized, this can be a hint that they may need organizational and study skill support rather than academic tutoring alone.

Creating structure can be incredibly helpful if your child is struggling and organizational challenges are reported by either the student or their teacher.

“If you have a child who has any kind of organizational or time management challenges, whether they have an official diagnosis or not, they need structure,” said Mitchell. “It is important to create that structure and reinforce it constantly. Building these habits can be a huge step toward avoiding surprise report cards and power struggles at home.”

It can still be helpful to check in with your student and their teacher if you aren’t noticing any of these warning signs. Because COVID learning loss had a notable impact on how students were graded, simply looking at a child’s report card is not necessarily a clear indication of their performance.

Why As and Bs May Not Be a Clear Indicator of Success

Depending on how your child’s school adjusted grading standards to adapt to post-COVID learning expectations, it is possible that a child with high grades on their report card may still be falling behind compared to broader academic standards or the performance of other children their age in other school systems.

“Even if a child has As and Bs on their report card, it’s possible that they are still struggling with school,” said Mitchell. “The Sylvan assessment is a great tool here. It’s completely unbiased, has nothing to do with school grades and is computer adaptive, so it will adjust the difficulty up or down based on their previous responses.”

Compared to a paper-based standardized test or classroom test, the Sylvan assessment is able to adjust in line with the child’s needs until their instructional level is identified. 

“A computer adaptive assessment allows us to see exactly where a student is and what kind of help they need,” added Mitchell. “This is important because, with a paper test, you can only learn what a child knows based on a pre-established set of questions. You might know that they are behind the academic standards used to create that test, but you don’t know how far behind.”

By working with your child’s teacher, guidance counselor or members of a supplemental education team, you can gather a more detailed picture of where your child stands in their education and begin to make an informed plan to support their success through the end of the year.

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