Factors that could contribute to student failure

Written By: PRISCILLA HLABANGWANE

As students, some seem to have a keen ability to adapt to every situation but others are thrown by the smallest change in routine. According to The University of Alabama centre of Academic success the impact of student failure can cause lasting damage to self-esteem and the consequences can influence an entire lifetime. Being mindful of this student failures can be essential in discovering the workable solutions.

Factors

Failure to assume responsibility

In most cases when students have just moved to a new province or environment where there are no parents or anyone to look over them, they have an increased freedom which they don’t know how to deal with. Then choices are presented regarding the use of time, personal habits, social activities and even whether or not to attend classes or do assignments.  This choices are ultimately the responsibility of the student and are accompanied by consequences. Most students are used to being told what to do and when to do it by parents, they are woken up in the morning to go to school by parents, they are also told to do assignments and attend classes every day by teachers because failure to do so parents are notified by the school about the progress of the learner. This changes when a student moves to university or colleges away from home. There, all responsibilities are upon them and the new routine becomes either difficult or the freedom is enjoyed too much and celebrated a lot in a negative way. Thus may result in student failure.

Hatred towards a certain subject or teacher

Hatred towards a certain subject can make a student fail because they concentrate so much on what they don’t like about the subject so much that they lose concentration on what is really important. Student can hate a subject because they hate the lecturer of that subject, and when they hate that lecturer they start missing classes, making noise in class or being busy with other things when the lecturer is busy. By so doing all concentration is lost and at the end the student doesn’t even study the subject and they fail. Some students don’t even do their own work, they copy from others because they just don’t have time for that subject. They don’t prepare enough and just find the subject unimportant, forgetting that at the end of the day they have to have passed that very subject in order to progress to another class or to do other subjects.

Primary care pediatricians in schools who help failing students should identify this problems and provide early intervention.