Characteristics of the Typical Low-Achieving Learner: Literacy-based programming for participants offers hope for reversing the trend of poor student achievement. It hails from cognitive science and reading development research which connects learning and reading as a route to higher-than-expected achievement among participants with poor comprehension skills and competence. Typically, the low-achieving student can be described broadly as a typical novice learner; for him or her, traditional approaches to learning do not work. Oftentimes, he (or she) is a student having trouble constructing meaning from text, the primary mechanism traditional schools use to teach Participants content and skill. These are Participants who are unable to connect the dots and construct meaning from text and they lack the critical capabilities to engage as thinkers while in the process of reading or learning. For them the experience is a once over unfocused activity with little emerging as more important than anything else.
Despite targeted efforts in the classroom and schoolwide learning interventions in school, low-achieving participants make limited or stagnant progress as learners and as readers. Cognitive science research indicates that such a learner lacks metacognition, a capability to monitor and regulate a person's thinking processes. Lacking in metacognition, the learner is also lacking in two critically important sub-skills: (a) comprehension monitoring and (b) comprehension fostering capabilities, skills that more capable learners take for granted and that are critical to constructing meaning and thereby comprehension. The importance of students' developing meta-cognitive awareness is paramount to their development as readers and as writers. Why? Because metacognition is the critical BUT missing ingredient among most low performing participants that is required to transform them into better learners, more aware learners, more capable learners.