BOULDER – Blair Tyse has a goal of helping struggling students boost SAT scores.

The California transplant recently opened The Learning Center at 75 Manhattan Drive, Suite 304, in Boulder where she is offering a series of classes for struggling students.

Tyse said she can help students who want to score well on the SAT test, the most widely used college admission test; students who want to overcome test-taking anxiety and athletes who want to boost their grades and test scores for NCAA eligibility.

Tyse started tutoring students to succeed at the SATs in 1994 when she founded Minds In Motion, a company she founded in the Bay Area of Northern California.

Since then, she has tutored more than 1,500 high school juniors and seniors and helped her students improve their scores by an average of 350 points. According to Tyse, building confidence in her students is the secret of her success.

"Taking the SATs is the academic equivalent of running a marathon, and for my students, I am the coach, teacher, mentor and cheerleader all rolled into one," Tyse said.

"My program breaks the test down into manageable pieces, teaches the strategies necessary for success, and offers the rigorous training and practice that gives students the skills and confidence needed to exceed their own expectations and dramatically improve their SAT performance."

Tyse is a big believer in one-on-one SAT training because each child comes to SAT testing with their own, individual obstacles to achieving the best possible standardized testing outcome.

Tyse's SAT preparation course includes 10 weekly 90-minute one-on-one sessions.

For struggling readers, The Learning Center employs the Barton Method, which uses a multisensory approach to reading that starts with phonemic awareness mastery (the ability to hear and identify individual sounds in spoken words).

Early in her SAT preparation career, Tyse saw that a huge stumbling block for many students stems from poor reading skills, frequently caused by differences in learning.

While American schools cater to the majority of students who exclusively use the left side of their brain for language work, new research shows that as much as 20 percent of the population uses the right side of their brain to read, spell and write, she said.

This difference in the way the brain is wired for language processing makes it approximately six times harder for people who use the right side of their brain for reading, spelling and writing to gain mastery in this area. As a result, students who have this difference in learning tend to avoid school and homework, dislike reading and writing, and can frequently be frustrated and angry about their academic experience.

According to the National Institute of Health, these students have normal, and often, above average intelligence. The way to unlock that intelligence is to tap into the strong visual-spatial skills through hands-on learning.

For more information, contact Tyse at www.thelearningcenterco.com or 303-887-7408.