The author discusses the boarding school model as a schooling alternative to improve life chances for disadvantaged youth, particularly African American youth, by positively meeting their social and educational needs. Bourdieu, Coleman, and other social scientists purported that these needs can be better met by exposing students to social and…

Stereotype threat (ST) has been linked to under performance and academic disidentification among girls in mathematics and science as well as African Americans in academics. However, it is still unclear whether ST and its negative effects extend to non-Western cultures. The authors explored the effects of ST on Ugandan females in coed and…

The authors conducted a third-party study of the student achievement effects of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform (CSR). The design was a quasiexperimental, pre-post matched sample (N = 180) with school as unit of analysis, drawing on 3 years of achievement data from standardized external assessments.…

In this study, the effectiveness of tutoring underachievers in reading and writing at the fourth, seventh, and tenth grade levels was checked. At all the grade levels, tutored underachievers progressed more than those who were not tutored. (Authors/JB)

Fourth-grade students were administered the Estes Attitude Scale to measure attitudes towards core academic subjects. When results were compared with test results of actual school performance, it was found that both extreme overachievers and underachievers had poorer attitudes toward core subjects than had other more accurately predicted…

This study confirmed the hypothesis that the Junior Index of Motivation Scale successfully differentiates between college bound and noncollege bound junior high school students. (RC)

Reports on a comparison of the performances of over-achievers, achievers, and under-achievers in mathematics on measures of general anxiety, test anxiety, and mathematics anxiety. The results confirm the hypothesis that the measure of mathematics-specific anxiety differentiates the under-achieving group from the other two groups more strongly than…

In a study, underachieving fifth and sixth graders who were weak in mathematics tutored second graders who were also weak in mathematics, replacing their regular classroom teachers. Results show that both tutors and tutees had significantly improved in mathematics on standard achievement tests. (JN)

This study was designed to investigate brief group therapy for underachievement and remediation for deficiencies in basic skills to determine their effectiveness in reducing the attrition rate of nursing students. (Authors/JA)

The authors examined whether gender differences in language achievement were related not only to gender differences in attitudes toward schooling but also to the attitudes toward schooling of peers (i.e., peers in classes and in schools). The authors used multilevel analysis on data compiled from a longitudinal research project in secondary…

Researchers taught unidimensional classification, unidimensional seriation, and number conversion to kindergartners lagging in cognitive development. The instruction resulted in significant gains on their achievement test scores. The gains seemed to result from mastery of key cognitive operations at a stage shift in cognitive development by…

A study of third- and fourth-grade students found no significant differences between underachieving and normally achieving children for the measures of cognitive-impulsivity, selective attention, and sustained attention. However, significant differentiation was provided by teacher ratings indicating poorer classroom behavior, lack of attention,…

Results of a study of 23 7th-grade students revealed that underachievers are less self-confident, less socially and emotionally mature, less able to focus on one concern at a time, less accurate in their perceptions about themselves and their work, and less hardworking than achievers. (IAH)