Task Initiation Tips For Students

Task Initiation Tips For Students: Executive functioning skills are important to a student doing well in school and in life. One of the most important parts of executive functioning skills is task initiation. This is the ability to start a given task or assignment without outside interference from parents and teachers. Many students with trouble with executive functioning skills especially struggle with task initiation. And this leads to a struggle completing tasks on time. This leads to incomplete work which will lower grades. There is unfortunately little research about how to develop better task initiation in students. But the research that has been done strongly empathizes helping the student know the “how” and “when” of assignments. And there are several things that parents can do to help their children do this on their own.

Having your student make a schedule is a great start. This makes sure that they will do their assignments by the due date. However, many students struggle to stick with the schedule. This can be avoided by including start times in the schedule. This helps prevent procrastination and the inevitable panic that comes when it is not done. If your student struggles with this it is not a bad idea to gently remind them the first few times. But the goal is to have them do this on their own.

Using a prompting system will also help this process go smoother. This can be anything from a check list to post-it notes. But the goal of this system is to remind and prompt the student to start tasks. This system can carry over into a student’s life in college and into the career world.

The goal of this system is to encourage students to initiate tasks and assignments on their own without people forcing them. So the most important step is to reinforce developing a task list and starting independently. The student is not on their own just yet, so gentle reminders and positive reinforcement are good to get the student to develop habits on their own. Students need to take the skills of developing task lists on with them when a parent or teacher is not there so reinforce these good habits.

The goal of these exercises is to have the student develop task initiation skills on smaller and more basic tasks. This arms them to apply these skills to the more complex tasks in harder classes and their future careers.

Click to read original article Task Initiation Tips For Students Original Article. For more Peak Academic Coaching articles visit the Blog Page. If you would like information about PAC’s success habit building and executive functioning skills training program visit the Academic Coaching Page. If you would like to see an overview of services offered by PAC, check out the Home Page. Read many amazing PAC success stories on the Testimonials Page. For a full overview of the services offered by Peak Academic Coaching go to the Home Page. Access PAC’s indepth phylosophy on our Core Principles Page. To see who PAC serves visit the About PAC Page. Does your child need Tutoring? To see the many areas of subject tutoring in which we offer support, visit the PAC Tutoring Page.