Newsletter Archive | Intervention for Children Struggling in School

Intervention for Children Struggling in School

An interview with Eric B. Pickering, Ph.D., co-author of Helping Children Learn. From the August 2003 Education newsletter.

When you look for alternative ways to teach a student, you need to ensure you’re addressing the root of the student’s problems. Are there gaps in the student’s knowledge? Problems with classroom setup? Does the student have a sensory difficulty or behavior problem? And, as is often the case given the well-documented relationship between cognitive processing and learning, does the student have cognitive processing weaknesses that are causing him or her to struggle?

Jack A. Naglieri, Ph.D., a professor at George Mason University, and Eric B. Pickering, Ph.D., a school psychologist at Grandview Heights City Schools in Ohio, have developed almost 50 practical instructional interventions designed to pinpoint and address student’s cognitive processing. Cognitive processes are the ways people think, learn, and solve problems — they are involved in everyday activities like driving a car and cooking dinner as well as reading, writing, and doing math. The interventions are based on Dr. Naglieri’s PASS model for understanding cognitive processing weakness, which identifies four main cognitive processing areas (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive).

Dr. Pickering uses PASS in the Grandview Heights City Schools and in his private practice. He uses the handouts to assess a student who not only has cognitive processing weaknesses but who also has academic skill needs, like test taking. ”These handouts can be used with many kids,” says Dr. Pickering. “They’re based on the student’s way of thinking so no child is going to lose out. You can use them in any classroom at any time, not necessarily just with students with problems.”

The PASS processes not only can be used in general education classrooms but also can be used in private practice, home schooling, and special education classrooms. “The special education teachers really soak it up because they don’t often have the resources that this process presents.”

When asked how he uses the handouts in his daily work, Dr. Pickering shared his strategies with us:

“In school, I use the handouts in two ways:

When a teacher realizes a student is struggling in a specific area like reading, writing, or organization, we look together at the grid in the book to find what interventions would fit. From there, either a tutor, teacher, or parent uses the intervention handouts with the child or the classroom teacher implements the intervention handouts with the whole class. I monitor to see how the child improves over time.
When a student is having problems or is already identified as having a disability or cognitive weakness, we use interventions that are intended to overcome the weakness. We then spend time trying to fully understand the [cognitive] area of weakness, often using the first 4 handouts on the PASS processes [available for free below], and try to develop teaching strategies to help the child process the information in another way.

For example, if a child with a weakness in Simultaneous processing is having trouble in history, such as understanding the Civil War and how things worked during that time (government, industry, etc.), we'll teach using more graphics and strategies that aid Simultaneous processing (e.g., graphic organizers for connecting and remembering information). Also, if a child seems to be achieving poorly on tests, I might get all three test-taking handouts and give them to the student's teachers and parents, encouraging them to teach the strategies to the student. We might even use the handouts as prompts for an entire class.

In private practice, I regularly attach the handouts to my reports. I can share these with parents, teachers, and even other therapists who are helping the child directly. The handouts help me communicate some of the child's needs and how possibly to help that child.

Using the handouts, psychologists, educators, and parents can do a more efficient job teaching by knowing the student’s strengths and weaknesses. With the pass processes, which are based on the way students think, the student will come out with a clearer understanding of learning.”

For more information about intervention, check out Helping Children Learn.

Back to full index