Strategies to Support Academic Confidence

It is important to always encourage and build up your client’s academic strengths. This will increase their confidence and academic self-efficacy. This will be especially important for clients diagnosed with ADHD and learning difficulties .

Some suggestions include:

If your client does not know the answer to a question they can tend to “freeze”. It will be important for your client to learn to identify when they are “stuck” or feeling overwhelmed, and the steps that they can take to get “unstuck”.

For example:

• Notice that I’m feeling overwhelmed.
• Take 5 deep breaths (or other relaxation strategy)
• Positive statement (e.g., “I can do this!”)
• Start with what I know. Ask myself “What do I know?”, “What is the first step?” or “What category of concepts could this be related to?” 

Your client’s teachers and parents can improve accuracy and positively influence their confidence when completing worksheets by intermixing ‘easy‘ problems among the ‘challenging‘ problems.

Research shows that students are more motivated to complete computation worksheets when they contain some very easy problems interspersed among the more challenging items.