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The Foundations of Learning:
Building Blocks of Academic Success
By Kelly Besecker
Educating a student is like building a house. For the house to stand
firm, it must have a strong foundation. Likewise in education,
students must have strong foundational skills that prepare them to
learn throughout their entire academic careers.
Preparing students to learn involves building a base of skills and
abilities that can be drawn upon daily in the classroom. Different
from knowing the alphabet or how to count to 100, true foundational
skills go deeper and involve not only abilities of the mind (for
example, memory and problem solving) but also physical abilities,
such as coordination and balance, and the senses. In other words,
much like a house’s foundation, the skills required for learning lie
deeper than those that are readily apparent, such as memory and
concentration.
To understand how students learn, it’s important to understand the
components of learning fundamentals.
The Role of the Senses
Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste – these are the five senses that
most of us recognize. However, research has pinpointed many more
senses that create perceptions about the world around us. If these
senses work together, we are able to merge and organize information
into a coherent mental picture of our environment. This is known as
sensory integration.
Sensory integration involves the brain, the spinal cord and the
nerves – the central nervous system. It allows for abilities such as
balance and hand-eye coordination. Students who have fully developed
sensory integration skills are better prepared for classroom
performance. For example, a student’s handwriting is improved
through developing fine motor skills. Posture and balance help a
child maintain attention and focus in the classroom. Yet, not all
students have fully developed sensory integration skills, which can
lead to problems for them in the classroom. Also, sensory
integration dysfunctions may go unrecognized and may be attributed
to other causes, like clumsiness or laziness.
Processing Information
It’s common practice for schools to conduct sight and hearing
screenings to detect potential impairments, yet seeing and hearing
abilities are only half the battle when it comes to learning.
Information received by the eyes and ears must also be processed.
This is known as visual and auditory processing.
There is a difference between eyesight and vision. Eyesight is what
we see with our eyes. Vision is the brain’s learned response to
information perceived by the eyes. Visual processing is important
because researchers estimate that about 80 percent of the
information that reaches us comes through our eyes.
Visual processing weaknesses are possible even with perfect
eyesight. Such problems can include eyestrain, poor visual
concentration, narrow peripheral vision, shallow depth perception,
slow visual reaction time or difficulty tracking the eyes left to
right or top to bottom, all detrimental to a student’s ability to
learn.
Likewise, perfect hearing does not indicate that a student is able
to listen to directions and follow them. Auditory processing skills
are the key to effective listening. Auditory processing is critical
when it comes to learning to read, reading comprehension, spelling
and classroom learning to name just a few.
Fundamentally, students must be able to comprehend and produce the
discrete sounds that comprise words, called phonemes. These sounds
are the basis of phonics. Auditory processing skills enable the
listener to discriminate between these sounds, selectively attend to
certain sounds and not others (i.e., filter out background noise)
and remember verbal information.
Brain Skills
As one might imagine, the ability of the brain to function is
critical to learning. Essentially, the brain is the common
denominator tying together the various aspects of our ability to
learn.
The workings of the brain, or cognitive abilities, cover a broad
spectrum of aptitudes, including comprehension, memory, deductive
reasoning, interpreting symbols, concept formation and other mental
skills.
Research has shown the brain, much like a muscle, can be exercised
and molded. This “plasticity” of the brain means that we can in fact
“train the brain” to learn. If a student has a weakness in a certain
area, it is possible to strengthen that area through mental
exercises.
Putting It All Together
Strengthening learning abilities by building skills in cognition,
sensory integration and perception is the basis of a foundation for
successful academic performance. Once students have mastered
fundamental abilities, they can learn subjects with more speed.
In an ideal world, these foundational skills would be mastered
before subject work, but in today’s classroom, that is not always
the case. Some students come to school prepared to learn with these
abilities because they have been able to acquire them informally.
Others come to school “unprepared to learn” and need help building
these skills. Sometimes cognitive, perceptual and sensory
integration skills can be obtained in the classroom setting. Often,
however, classroom teachers are faced with a broad diversity of
student needs and only one curriculum that is focused more on
advancing student’s progress in subject matter than on building
fundamental learning skills.
Sometimes supplemental help is needed to aid children in
strengthening their learning skills. While many tutoring programs
only offer students assistance in specific subject areas, some
tutoring programs have programs for building foundational skills in
cognitive, perceptual and sensory integration.
Building Blocks for Learning Success
Returning to the building analogy, the groundwork for a successful
academic career lies in developing key cognitive, sensory
integration and perceptual skills. Once a student is proficient in
learning, they can master any concept or content they are challenged
with. When fully built, skills in cognition, perception and sensory
integration are the foundation for lifelong academic success.
Kelly Besecker is vice president of SuccessLab Learning Centers, the
only retail tutoring chain in the Washington metropolitan area that
identifies, evaluates and remediates 43 separate cognitive, sensory
and perceptual skills to eliminate learning barriers for students in
pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. For more information please
visit www.successlab.com .
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