How to help children in school performance

Vocational orientation

Author: Dr. Edgar Beltrán, Dra. Diana Jaramillo Modified date: 01/06/2023

There are various ways and means to help children to improve their school performance without resorting to advice or punishment. Let's get into the topic.

What elements or factors intervene in the good or bad performance of children in studies?

They are very varied and are related to the pedagogical method of the educational center, the pedagogical preparation of the teachers, the evaluation system, the expectations of the parents, the mental abilities of the student, the good health or the various physical or psychological that hinder performance.

What factors can parents intervene in?

As in everything in life, there are situations that are not in our hands to change and others that are. Everything related to the educational system is hardly in our hands to modify it. If there is any disease in the children, in this case you can intervene with professional help. To improve school performance, we are going to focus on healthy children and on the innate abilities and potential that each minor possesses and that, well directed or directed by the parents, can achieve better performance in the study. Here we have two scenarios: one in which the child performs, let's say normal, but that can be improved with our methodology; the other scenario is that of the student who has a low school performance and whom we can help to improve.

What are innate potentialities and abilities?

They are those that are born with us, that are located in the cerebral cortex and that have their own characteristics with abilities for certain activities, trades, professions and personal relationships. We have all had the experience of being good at mathematics, literature or art, but in other fields of knowledge we feel that we are not skilled and it costs us a lot of effort to learn and practice.

What are such innate potentialities and abilities?

In the scientific field, there are various studies that have made classifications and here we will take that of C. Jung and others who found the existence of four independent types or modes of thought and with their own characteristics. One of them is the most efficient and where the skills are at their best, and because it is the most efficient it is called NATURAL TALENT. Each way or style of thought has its own characteristics for learning and practicing certain trades and professions and are called: ANALYTICAL thinking (logical, mathematical, planner), NORMATIVE (ordered, follows the rules and social norms at the bottom of the letter), the AFFECTIVE (emotional, sentimental) and the CREATIVE (curious, innovative, dreamer, artist). As we have seen, only one of these styles of thinking is the most efficient and if the learning, the trade or the profession coincide, the minor has a high performance without much effort and with great personal satisfaction.

However, under various circumstances (family, economic, tastes, cultural values), pressure may appear so that the minor does not use his talent, but instead uses another less efficient thinking style, which hinders learning and good school performance throughout their studies.

It can happen that parents intuitively identify the natural talent of their children and support and encourage it. It may also happen that parents do not have the concept of natural talent and believe that we all have the same mental abilities and that it is enough to direct them in some way to achieve good school performance. It may also happen that they discover the natural talent of their children, but for family or personal reasons, parents pressure them towards studies, trades or professions that are different from their natural talent.

How do you identify natural talent in children?

With our methodology, the strategy is for parents to identify their natural talents, their strengths and weaknesses at the thinking level, and this provides them with sufficient skills to identify natural talent in their children and places them in a privileged position to encourage them to achieve high school performance. Parents are given a written test to identify their own dominant thinking, their strengths and weaknesses, thus achieving a better understanding of themselves.

*A definition of Thought: "It is the mental representation of oneself, of others and of the world that surrounds it."

For more information go to the vocational orientation profile and natural talent.

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