There are three key phases to any successful learning:

• Input – ingoing information – teacher shared information.
• Elaboration – internal thinking processes and skills – how the students understand the incoming information, how they make sense and meaning of it in connection to other learning and/or their own personal experiences, and how they process this.
• Output – students’ outward performance, this will be their written work or their verbal responses.

When students experience difficulties with learning, it is usually possible to pinpoint where their metacognitive areas of weakness are. There could be difficulties with focus and concentration, poor working memory, poor auditory learning skills, general executive functioning difficulties, poor logic and reasoning skills, limited planning behaviours, or flexible thinking issues, to name a few. Any of these can cause difficulties in one or more of the above learning stages. These are all treatable, and with the right support, students learn to develop their skill set, overcome their challenges and make good progress

In the classroom

Teachers are under pressure to cover a set curriculum of learning, and can sometimes look to use what they see as the most efficient way of getting through the material. Unfortunately, this is often not an effective learning experience for the students because students just passively receive information without actively working for it. Students thus lose out on crucial elaboration processes. Paradoxically, though, once effective thinking skills are place, the learning process can then speed up, sometimes dramatically.

In general, schools are heavily focused on their students’ output, often little attention is paid to the elaboration phase. This phase, however, is crucial for students if they are to be able to self-motivate. Students who have weak cognitive skills struggle at school, and can’t see the point of continuously applying themselves when they believe they will fail yet again. Often these struggles go by unnoticed because classes are short and contact with any particular teacher tends to be piecemeal. Classroom behaviours can be impacted negatively and students will have a lethargic approach to learning if they have not learned to take responsibility for active learning.

There are often 3 parts to lack of progress in the classroom

1. The inability of some students to access the learning material. Students with metacognitive weaknesses in a particular area may struggle in many academic subjects.
2. The lack of perceived self-competence that students feel after repeated failure then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which continues the downward spiral.
3. For all students, the lack of opportunities to engage in independent learning means that they remain passive learners, unable to self-motivate through building on the beliefs developed through past achievements.

Students do not generally look to actively fail. If, however, they no longer believe that they have the capacity to do anything different, they will behave according to their beliefs. In their minds, they are simply making the best of the situation they find themselves in, often, unfortunately, to the detriment of general classroom learning and behaviour.

General classroom management aims to give teachers guidance to help their student body to access their learning. On its own, however, this will not be sufficient to tackle the girls’ feelings of self-competence or lack of belief in their performance. The students need to learn to make use of and value their elaboration thinking processes.

Students must experience themselves making progress. Once they have seen that they do indeed have the capacity to improve and develop their skillset, they begin to develop intrinsic motivation and look to be active members of their classes. They find meaning in their learning and believe in being an integral part of the classroom system.