You've been sent into a gold mine with a mud pot in hand. You can fill it with as much gold as you can. It's all yours!

You keep stuffing the pot to your heart's content. You want more. You keep stuffing. The inevitable happens. The pot breaks. No gold in the end.

If you crave for more gold, the pragmatic solution would have been to take a bigger pot in hand.  It's the same with a child's brain. Pushing beyond its capacity would not yield results. It would be prudent to look at enhancing his/her capacity instead.

One example is sending a child to multiple tuition and coaching classes to improve academic grades. If the child is capable of understanding lessons, he/she would have done it in the school in the first place. If there is a problem in understanding concepts in the class room, then the same problem is carried to the tuitions too. So tuitions cannot help in bringing about significant changes.

The alternate approach would be to enhance the child's learning system. The brain has a set of attributes to help a child to learn. Attention, working memory, processing speed, visual processing, auditory processing, logic and reasoning are some of them. The collection of all these attributes is called " Cognitive Skills"

Diagnosing and Improving these skills lays the foundation for a child's academic success. A deficit in any of these areas will have an impact on a child's ability of absorb, process and store information. Ultimately, the learning process gets disrupted.

For example, a child lacking "Visual Processing" skills will have difficulty learning through reading books and understanding diagrams. On the other hand a child with poor "Auditory Processing" skills will struggle to make sense of concepts by listening. Cognitive skills cannot be improved by coaching and lecturing. It is not knowledge to be learned. They are skills to be practiced.

They can be enhanced through specific activities which stimulate and activate regions of brain and improve its corresponding functionalities. Research based cognitive skills programs for improving academic performance are taking precedence over tuitions and coaching classes worldwide. In coming years, it will no doubt be a major driving force in the child education system.