Problems Learning Content

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Given that attention to the learning task or activity is the first part of the learning process, it is not surprising that children who are vulnerable subsequently have problems learning information. Children may have difficulty learning information because they are required to process, or encode, too much information at one time. For example, if children are inundated with facts from a language that they are not proficient in, they will often have to process information multiple times and may miss some important information.

Other problems are related to failing to work with information long enough for its retention to occur. If a child is worrying about where his homeless parents are or where he is going to sleep that night, rehearsing math facts or even reading or listening to the most interesting story may be impossible. Children’s attention may quickly switch from academic tasks to their concerns for their families’ physical well-being, and they may not be able to work with information long enough to move it into their long-term memory.

Children who are vulnerable are also likely to have problems retrieving information from their long-term memory. If such information was not learned to a level of fluency (knowledge that is accurate and/also retrieved quickly), then this will affect how or whether a child applies this knowledge. For example, if a child remembers only the first two steps of a process or procedure and not the last two, this will affect the child’s performance on that task.

Perhaps the most important academic implication for children who are vulnerable is that they may not have the same prerequisite knowledge that their peers possess. This prerequisite knowledge can be about how to complete a particular process or routine (procedural knowledge) or can be factual knowledge of specific content (declarative knowledge; Raymond, 2004). As a result, teachers cannot assume that children would have learned certain skills simply because they were part of the curriculum the previous year or because they were part of a lesson last week. Children who are vulnerable for failure tend to have gaps in their knowledge.