Each year, some of our highest-achieving Caribbean students leave secondary school with excellent grades and every reason to believe they are well prepared for higher education. Then they arrive in Europe, including the Netherlands, and some begin to struggle.
Some fail.
The reasons are complex, and it would be irresponsible to reduce them to a single explanation. But in my work with Caribbean students, one factor has surfaced repeatedly and deserves more attention: how students understand and regulate their own learning.
I have worked with capable students whose learning strategies simply did not match what they were trying to learn. More importantly, many did not recognise that mismatch.
They would receive an assignment and begin working immediately, without first stopping to ask: What exactly am I being asked to do? What do I already know? What don’t I understand? What strategy would work best here?
The focus was often on the outcome: getting it right, passing, getting the good grade.
But learning requires more than effort. It requires the ability to stop, question, monitor and adjust.
That is metacognition.
Research in the learning sciences supports what I have observed in practice. Work by cognitive neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, among others, has drawn attention to the importance of explicitly teaching students how learning works. The broader research on metacognition similarly shows that when students learn to plan, monitor and adjust their learning, both their learning strategies and academic performance can improve.
Yet there is another part of this problem we discuss less readily.
Students I have worked with often waited far too long before asking for help. Saying “I don’t understand” could feel like admitting “I am not intelligent enough.” Feedback could be experienced in much the same way: not as information that could improve learning, but as evidence of inadequacy.
Institutions have a responsibility here too.
Students have told me that the way feedback was delivered sometimes left them feeling stupid. Metacognition does not develop in a vacuum. If students experience feedback as humiliation rather than information, reluctance to seek it is not simply a student deficit. We also need to examine the learning environments we create.
So when a previously successful student begins to struggle, perhaps our first conclusion should not be that the work is too difficult.
A struggling learner does not necessarily need an easier road. Sometimes that learner needs a better map.
Can the student recognise when a learning strategy is failing and adjust it? Can they seek feedback or ask for help before difficulty becomes crisis?
These are not fixed characteristics. They are skills, and they can be taught.
This is particularly important when students move between educational cultures. The strategies that produced success in one environment may not be sufficient in another.
And therein lies the challenge.
Good grades tell us what a student has achieved. They do not necessarily tell us whether that student knows how to learn when the rules change.
Perhaps preparing Caribbean students for higher education therefore requires us to ask more than: Are they academically ready?
We should also be asking:
Do they know what to do when, for the first time, being good at school is no longer enough?
About the author
drs. Jean-Marie Codrington Schmidt is an education leader specialising in student success, metacognition and learning. Originally from Dominica and raised partly in St. Eustatius, she has worked in Dutch higher education for more than 18 years. She is the developer of the #ToughLove® approach to student success.
