Why Many Students Fail to Achieve Their Potential

So many factors can influence the academic performance of young people.

I spend much of my life meeting with people who are not achieving the academic or career success they or their families anticipated.  I also devote a good deal of energy to commiserating with parents whose very talented children are not coming anywhere near to realizing their potential. 

This is a very difficult situation for everyone concerned.  Underperformance generates frustration, disappointment, anger, disillusion and sadness.  It can undermine people’s self-confidence, create self-doubts and cause people to give up on themselves and goals that are well within their reach.

There are numerous factors and influences that can interfere with a student’s ability to perform at his or her best.  But it’s not hard to observe certain themes that emerge repeatedly when talking with people about what they feel got in the way of what might have been.

Many students find attending school a real trial.  What they study doesn’t engage them in the least, they don’t connect with teachers, are uninspired, unmotivated and not willing to make the choices and sacrifices that excellence almost inevitably entails in any field of activity.  They may be under-challenged, under-stimulated or simply bored, especially if they fall into the gifted realm.

Ultimately they lack the goals and direction that provide meaning and focus for them, that connect with what they value and could work toward with genuine enthusiasm.  They find limited meaning in their disconnected learning, no plan that excites them and simply coast, doing just enough to get by.  Parents lose a lot of sleep worrying and obsessing about how to turn this situation around.

There is no easy answer to this challenge, especially when it has existed for an extended period.  The way out lies in helping students identify the core strengths, interests and values that inspire them and then assisting them to develop appealing academic and career goals, with a specific plan for achieving them.  This is rarely easy but almost always doable.

Student success can also be undermined by a misguided set of priorities.  Academic excellence requires many short term sacrifices that support distant goals.  The rewards of social activities, athletics, scrolling social media or co-curricular involvements are immediate. 

It’s nice to have lots of discretionary income and many students work way too many hours weekly to complete academic tasks effectively.  In effect, students choose to fit school around interests and activities they find most rewarding instead of organizing personal, social and work activities around their learning needs.  Bringing attractive academic and career goals to the fore and inspiring the desire to make them the number one priority can create dramatic changes in outcome.

The issue of learning disabilities is one that has impressed itself vividly on my consciousness over the years.  Despite the scepticism that some people bring to this issue, many students struggle to manage attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, find that the singular way learning often proceeds in the classroom doesn’t work for them, experience perceptual challenges with reading comprehension, writing skills or math or simply don’t know how to learn.

Our schools have been stripped of many of the psychologists, learning specialists and resource teachers who can help identify problems and implement strategies for managing them.  The pace of learning is too fast for some, too slow for others and teachers lack the time to know who’s in trouble and offer remediation due the amount of material that must be covered.  This can prove disastrous.

Lastly, there are many students who have never connected their performance with success or failure in life.  Whether they excel or fail they still get the prize.  Negative behaviour at home or school has few consequences.  Allowances are provided whether obligations get met or not. 

The message students receive is that they’ll thrive and be rewarded whatever results they achieve.  Success is divorced from effort.  The workplace often provides a rude awakening but unhealthy attitudes and bad habits become well ingrained.

There’s no easy way to address these problems.  Perhaps they are rather inevitable outcomes of a prosperous society and the excesses of the self-esteem movement.  But at the level of individual students and families they are cause for great consternation and heartache.