Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of at-risk students in a rural district in Midwestern USA. Design/methodology/approach: This field-based research study used a qualitative embedded case study of a middle and high school informed by an appreciative inquiry theoretical research perspective to identify a positive core of…

A study investigated the effectiveness of a program for the development of literacy skills among low-achieving kindergarten students. The targeted population consisted of those identified as most at risk in the kindergarten classes at Willard Elementary School located in South Elgin, a village south of Elgin in northern Illinois. The problem of…

As the nation gears up for a massive educational restructuring, a major issue regarding thousands of teachers who function at substandard levels has yet to be addressed, and even the latest educational restructuring proposals show little concern for this problem. Indicators of marginality include failure to maintain discipline, difficulties in…

Noting that only some of the approaches to helping low achievers learn more successfully have been systematically studied to determine their effectiveness, this paper summarizes what research indicates will help low achievers improve performance, and provides a resource list of books and reports with more details on the topic. Following a brief…

This book is about the uprooting of racism, explaining how individual beliefs and actions need to be reexamined in order for people to participate effectively in that uprooting. It serves as an invitation to join the tradition of white people who have been committed to ending the effects of racism. The first step is for white people to talk…

During the 1989-90 school year, Tennessee established Project Challenge in 17 of Tennessee's poor and educationally low-performing counties. The program applied the results of Project STAR, a longitudinal experiment causally linking class size to student achievement. This paper presents findings of a study that evaluated Project Challenge by…

In the Head Start Public School Transition Demonstration Project, 32 demonstration sites across the country have extended Head Start-like services to help low-income children transition smoothly into the elementary grades. Preliminary evaluation of a demonstration program in two West Virginia counties suggested that Head Start students receiving…

An intervention designed to increase the reading skills, habits, and styles of low-performing elementary school students was implemented in the Dallas Independent School District (Texas). The issues surrounding implementation illustrate many of the problems of inner-city schooling and disadvantaged students and offer some solutions. The Reading…

In an effort to determine which factors most consistently identified incoming at-risk students, Prince George's Community College (PGCC), in Maryland, conducted a longitudinal study of fall 1990 entering freshmen without previous college experience. After dividing the cohort into at-risk categories (e.g., age, study load, racial background,…

This publication provides a review of the research on issues relating to the gap in achievement between high- and low-performing students, focussing specifically on the topics of retention in grade, remediation of students who are underachieving, and accelerated instruction. Following the executive summary and introductory material, three sections…

Any explanation of the absence of African Americans from the workforce in positions requiring mathematics usually begins with an acknowledgment of black underachievement in mathematics from the early grades and continuing throughout secondary schooling. Yet there are those among this group that are successful in studying mathematics. This paper…

This paper addresses issues in the definition of traditionally underserved persons who are deaf. It notes that these people have traditionally been labeled as low functioning, low achieving, multiply handicapped, minimal language skilled, and disadvantaged. A new definition, developed by the Northern Illinois University Research and Training…

The Success for All (SAF) program was designed as a K-3 preventative and intensive intervention for students at risk of failing to learn to read for the purpose of bringing every student to grade level in reading by third grade. Key program elements include individualized tutoring, regrouping across grades into homogeneous reading classes, smaller…

In the Cleveland (Ohio) Public Schools, the percent of students who are retained in grade, or who are not promoted, is high. At the high school level, retention rates ranged from 9 percent to 47 percent in the 1988-89 school year. School characteristics that correlate with the rate of retention are studied in an attempt to understand some of the…

As a step toward developing appropriate instructional techniques to help learning disabled college students, mechanical errors were compared in the expository essays and controlled stimulus passages (rewrites) of 15 learning disabled, 15 normal, and 15 basic writers at the college level. Analysis of both types of writing samples showed that…