We all know school can be quite challenging at any age. When a student performs badly in a subject, they tend to give up on the subject. This is because they fail to understand that every student has academic weaknesses and strengths that most are yet to identify.
These affect their performance positively or negatively depending on how willing they are to identify it and improve it. When students fail while trying to improve their weaknesses, they lack confidence and neglect the strengths that need the most improvement.
Improving the academic strength of students helps them excel in every aspect. It eventually dominates their weakness and sparks a boost in their academic performance.
If you are curious about how to get that spark that boosts your academic performance, let me be your guide throughout this section as you learn all about the academic strengths and weaknesses of students.
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What are Academic Weaknesses?
Academic weaknesses are downsides to a child’s personality that result in problems in their academic fields.
They are those things you find challenging to do but willing to change and correct. Nobody is perfect, so having academic challenges doesn’t mean it’s over for you.
You just have to identify, cull it out and rise above them in your academic environment.
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Examples of Academic Weaknesses for Students
You can only be able to cull out your academic weaknesses if you have them. There are various academic weaknesses for students, they include:
Indiscipline:
This form of academic weakness occurs when students lack control over their behavior and act in whatever way that seems pleasing to them, disobeying rules and breaking the norms of their school.
They can be expelled from school, suspended, or barred from attending a particular lecture, this, in turn, will reflect in their academic performance is poor.
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Procrastination:
Students procrastinate when they keep postponing certain activities that need to be done at that particular time for no reasonable reason.
Procrastination makes them lose focus on what they are supposed to do, it also makes them disorganized and some abandon the work finally.
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Intolerance:
This can make working with others seem impossible for students. For instance, if a member of their team makes a mistake during a group project, they get infuriated and frustrated, this can make a group and team activities hard.
Dullness:
When a student is dull, they lack mental sharpness or intelligence; they are sluggish, stupid, and dim-witted.
They find it hard to air their views on schoolwork and projects even if they know their answers are right.
This is one of the academic weaknesses that bring down their academic performance.
Aggression:
Being aggressive can be good in some situations, but in school, it can turn you into a bully with no one willing to take part in the same group as you. You can be a loner.
Lack of focus:
You can lose focus when you are susceptible to being distracted by your environment and therefore have a short attention span.
We also see losing focus when you cannot finish your given homework, sleep a lot during the class, or prefer other irrelevant stuff to study.
Impatience:
This is when you have the desire for something to happen immediately.
You can’t wait, you just want that school experiment to give you a result sharply, and you just want the next class to begin.
Such behavior can actually make you lose focus and result in negative situations.
How to Improve Academic Weakness of Students
Before you can improve your academic weaknesses, you must identify and make a list of them. This is the first step needed to improve those weaknesses.
Go through your created list and begin to think of ways you can solve them. Let’s look at some academic weaknesses and how we can change them to the strengths of students.
Lack of Focus:
If you find studying for a long period of time difficult, why not break it down into smaller periods.
This is a good point because when you divide time and work into smaller blocks, the task at hand seems more manageable.
You cannot focus if you for several hours try an hour or 30minutes and with practice, you can increase the amount of time till it’s suitable for you.
Fear of Failure:
You find it difficult to speak out, ask questions, or indulge in school activities because you feared being wrong, embarrassed, and criticized.
The right thing to do is to practice speaking out in your room, with your friends, family gatherings, or events with a smaller group of people.
You should discipline yourself to go all out, ask questions in class, answer questions and face your fears; you don’t have to think about other people’s opinions of you.
Procrastination:
In the act of procrastination, they tend to be unprepared for what they might face next.
To avoid this weakness, be well prepared for that seminar speech or that assignment. Divide your time and work into manageable blocks.
Get ahead of your schedule, revise and have a look at that assignment again.
Create a time range to accomplish to solve each problem or meet up with any activity and reward yourself when you get your target.
Being Disorganized:
To achieve this, students should create a list of everything they wish to achieve and give details of how they can get it done.
Writing this list out should be supported by actions and efforts for it to turn out well.
Failure to Speak with a Guardian or Mentor:
What could be better than having someone to listen to your problems and seek a solution?
When faced with an academic weakness, seek solutions from people smarter than you, they can be in form of your parents, head of department, siblings, friends, and parents.
This set of people can easily motivate and teach you how to deal with those weaknesses.
What is the Academic Strength of a Student?
This is just the opposite of academic weakness. They are the positive traits that make you stand out from others in an environment.
Basically, they help you get better grades than you expected. They are inbound in you and tend to come out when you need to show how good you are in a particular field.
Examples of Academic Strength of Students
Discipline:
This is one of the important strengths of students that helps increase their academic performance and boost their skills.
Being disciplined allows you to muster the courage to do the right thing at the right time, control your emotions and refuse procrastination.
Being Open Minded:
When you are open-minded, you become willing to learn, unlearn, and see things from a different perspective.
This is the strength of students that allows them to grow and be recognized among others.
Time Management:
Now, this is the opposite of procrastination. Why waste time when you can plan it out and stick to it.
Time management keeps track of your activities and task and helps you reach your goals and expectations.
Leadership:
This is the act of being able to guide and lead a group of people or an organization to achieve its goals.
In terms of group projects or assignments, a good leader makes the work achievable, keeps the team together, and understands the teammates.
Creativity:
When you can recognize possibilities or ideas, develop them, and use them to resolve issues, interact with others, and entertain people, this is called being creative.
Planning Skills:
This act of knowing what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, is the strength of students that helps them journey across time mentally.
It makes achieving one’s goal possible within a stipulated period.
Socialization:
Socialization is a unique strength of students that entails whether a child can indulge freely in school activities, speak out, or become dull.
It starts from childhood and progresses to adulthood. When a child is social, they become close to others, find it easy to approach or are approached, easily speak their mind as they don’t feel shy around people.
How to Find the Academic Strength of Students
Identifying the academic strength of students improves their academic and general performance.
They realize their environment and how to use their strengths to advantage. When you try to determine the academic strength of students in your class, there are certain steps to follow to achieve this result.
This includes:
Self-Evaluation:
You can hand out templates on strength evaluation to students, have them fill and return them within a period.
This template should contain a list of the strength of students; also, the listed strengths should be well explained to give them an insight into the meaning of each.
Feedback:
Another way of determining the strength of students is to have a one-on-one meeting with their parents or guardians.
During the teacher has a one-on-one talk with the student concerning the leaflet handed out to be filled by them.
Talk to Someone Trustworthy:
Students might feel shy or uncomfortable around their teachers or guardians. When this happens, they cannot open up and buckle everything inside.
At this moment, advise them to simply talk to someone they consider trustworthy to pour out their problems.
This is one of the difficult yet easiest ways to identify the strength of students at any level.
How to Improve the Academic Strength of Students
Now that you know the academic strength of students, you have also listed it out after various talk sessions or consultations, but does it stop there?
No. you have to know how to improve these strengths and channel them towards something useful or your academic performance.
Here are a few ways you can improve the academic strength of students:
‘SMART’ goals:
What are ‘SMART’ goals? This is an abbreviation meaning your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound respectively.
Instead of using the academic strengths on just getting good grades why not use it to set goals.
Specific: they should be able to know what exactly they really want to achieve
Measurable: how long can it be achieved or is it impossible?
Achievable: can their goals workout, is it something that is difficult but yet can be accomplished?
Realistic: is it real? Not just based on their favorites fairytales or movies
Time bound: at the end of their goal setting, how long does it take to reach each step.
These improve their academic strength and literally back it up.
Study More:
Most students only study at exam time or when there’s a class test coming up. They tend to ignore how often study is needed.
Studying often helps sharpen students’ skills, it also exposes underlying skills.
When they develop the ability to give more time to studies, their intellectual abilities widen, they become more creative and other students tend to listen to them.
Get a Mentor:
The best aspect of improving the academic strength of students is by getting a mentor or tutor for them. This set of individuals can easily identify the student’s strength with time.
They tend to be focused on helping the students understand and deal with their strengths by giving broad knowledge on a [particular aspect or course of study.
Take Extra Class:
They can improve their strengths, such as intellectual abilities, proper reading, creativity, etc., by signing up for extra classes or sessions.
When they are good at mathematics, they can sign up for coding classes but if it’s music, then they can sign up for poetry classes.
This is simply saying they should sign up for things related to what they love doing.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Yes, being shy is a weakness. You can cull it through discipline and also trying to speak out when with friends or age mates.
Yes, it does. A proper planning skill reduces procrastination and gets you right to work
Yes, identifying, finding, and using your strengths in academic work improve your academic performance beyond average.
Try having extra classes on that particular course, get a mentor, and take out time to study the course.
Conclusion
The academic weaknesses and strengths of students are positive and negative traits that either interfere with their performance positively or negatively.
The first step to improving your strengths and weaknesses is to identify them and work on them in order to succeed in any academic field.
Reference
- What is my Strength?
- Examples of Academic Strengths and Weaknesses
- List of Academic Strengths and Weaknesses
- Finding and Understanding your Academic Strengths and Weaknesses
- Identifying Strengths and Weakness