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Interpreting inconsistent performance as low effort or a lack of motivation.
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Relying on verbal-only, one-off instructions for multi-step tasks.
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Changing a deadline or format at short notice without clear advance notice.
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Naming or drawing attention to a student's support needs in front of the class.
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Issuing only behaviour-focused responses (reminders, redirection) where the actual barrier is planning or working memory, not conduct.
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Assuming a student who manages well in one module or session will manage equally well in another — performance is genuinely context-dependent.
In Practice — An unstructured deadline sequence
A first-year student with ADHD (a composite, illustrative example) consistently submitted strong individual pieces of work but missed the overall deadline for a multi-part portfolio assignment two terms running, despite starting early both times.
What helped: the module leader restructured the same assignment into three staged submissions with brief feedback at each stage, rather than a single final deadline — no change to the actual content or standard required, only to how progress was checked along the way.
The lesson: the barrier was never the student's understanding of the subject; it was the absence of external checkpoints to compensate for a genuine planning difficulty. The same staging benefited several other students in the group who were simply glad of the earlier feedback.