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“Thank you for all of the wonderful work that you have been doing with our daughter. Her confidence in her academic abilities has grown immensely over the last few months. She seems to be getting back on track. Today is her first Mock Trial competition. A year ago she would have never gotten involved. Again, thank you for taking such a keen interest in our daughter’s success.”
-Parent of an 11th grade student
Students with deficits in executive functions frequently have significant difficulty with the initiation, planning, and execution of both academic and non-academic tasks. Students with this profile are often very bright individuals who have a discrepancy in IQ score subsets; in many cases, their verbal IQ is significantly higher than their performance IQ.
These students usually excel at school with minimal effort in the elementary grades, as they are able to rely on their strong verbal intelligence. They often begin to have academic trouble in the late middle school and early high school years, when academic demands increase and assignments require developed skills in planning and organization.
Students and parents are sometimes caught off guard because the student neither previously had to work diligently outside of the classroom nor developed the skills necessary for success in the middle school years. Students, teachers, and parents may become frustrated; students can’t understand why they are no longer achieving at the same level, and parents and teachers sometimes misperceive the student as “lazy.” If not addressed early, students begin to lose self-confidence, tensions in families increase, and academic performance declines.
Vantage Point Tutors works with students with deficits in executive functions on multiple fronts. While our program is tailored to the individual student’s needs, all executive function tutoring involves working with students on developing an individualized strategy for the student to address planning and organization of time and school work from the macro level (i.e., a semester) to the micro level (i.e., a day). The tutor works with the student to identify strategies that are helpful for the individual student. It is frequently the case that as the student starts to implement the suggestions garnered in the tutoring sessions, the student’s performance begins to improve, the student begins to regain self-confidence, and tension in the family decreases.
¹National Center for Learning Disabilities (http://www.ncld.org/content/view/865/391/)
These students usually excel at school with minimal effort in the elementary grades, as they are able to rely on their strong verbal intelligence. They often begin to have academic trouble in the late middle school and early high school years, when academic demands increase and assignments require developed skills in planning and organization.
Students and parents are sometimes caught off guard because the student neither previously had to work diligently outside of the classroom nor developed the skills necessary for success in the middle school years. Students, teachers, and parents may become frustrated; students can’t understand why they are no longer achieving at the same level, and parents and teachers sometimes misperceive the student as “lazy.” If not addressed early, students begin to lose self-confidence, tensions in families increase, and academic performance declines.
Vantage Point Tutors works with students with deficits in executive functions on multiple fronts. While our program is tailored to the individual student’s needs, all executive function tutoring involves working with students on developing an individualized strategy for the student to address planning and organization of time and school work from the macro level (i.e., a semester) to the micro level (i.e., a day). The tutor works with the student to identify strategies that are helpful for the individual student. It is frequently the case that as the student starts to implement the suggestions garnered in the tutoring sessions, the student’s performance begins to improve, the student begins to regain self-confidence, and tension in the family decreases.
¹National Center for Learning Disabilities (http://www.ncld.org/content/view/865/391/)
Executive function is defined by the National Center for Learning Disabilities as “a set of mental processes that helps us connect past experiences with present action. We use executive function when we perform such tasks as planning, organizing, strategizing, and paying attention to and remembering details.”¹
