Five main themes emerged in this study: self-regulation skills, multilayer interactions, curriculum failure, identification policy, and supportive solutions.
Self-regulation skills
This theme containing three more related categories including: self-awareness, low goal setting, and inability to describe oneself without judgment.
One participant ascertained: I think one of the significant challenges is that they don't have self-awareness, and that's why they're justifying it instead of rooting the problem out.
Another respondent argued that: Nothing terrible happens to students because they don't realize at all. One skill is self-awareness—the ability to look at oneself.
Multilayer interactions
This theme refers to the four categories: family role, peer role, hidden curriculum, and teacher-student relationships.
Family members both positively and negatively contribute to the prevention or creation of problematic students.
Participants said in this regard: "We have another problem. There are parents, called helicopter parents, according to our field. Helicopter parents are those who raise their children under the age of 18 in the lap of luxury. Then, they immediately bring their children to university and throw them down. They're spinning up. They're neither going to take our hand nor helping us to see what we should do. The story of our intervention is that the family has to intervene, but they are inefficient".
Participants in the study reported that the hidden curriculum and teacher-student relationships also played an essential role in creating or preventing problem learners.
One of the participants says: our teachers are generation x, students of generation y and z, and this difference between the generations causes them not to read each other's words. Student-teacher relations are disrupted and cause academic failure.
Curriculum failure
The most common codes are presented in this theme. This could be described by three categories: Inappropriate curriculum, ineffective teaching, and evaluation are the causes of curriculum failure.
One of the respondents said: teachers' inability to effectively communicate when teaching led to problem students.
A participant commented about the inappropriate curriculum: "For example, our problem is about the expected curriculum. Some students believe that the content of the medical curriculum is irrelevant to their future job needs. Hence, differences between the expected and experienced curricula sometimes make a huge discrepancy that can lead to disappointed students.
Identification policy
In this study, it has been stated that the identification system isn't systematic.
Some participants reported: some institutions identified a problem student based on formal criteria, while others identified informal group meetings, so there was no comprehensive identification policy.
Supportive strategies
In this category, supportive strategies have been proposed based on the role of family, peers, educational system, and teachers.
One participant said:"
In the educational system, in addition to assessing knowledge, we measure items such as study skills, learning style, etc., it can help us not have problem students.
Another participant reported:
The failure is desirable in some cases when the individuals have no talent in a particular field. So, these failures warn us to encourage the student to choose another field.