The purpose of this paper is to describe the efficacy of early literacy interventions and to discuss possible roles for volunteer tutors in helping prevent reading difficulties within the Response to Intervention process. First, we describe a landmark study that evaluated the impact of primary classroom instruction on reducing the proportion of…

This paper reports the results of a study of strategies that Dutch children with dyslexia employ to cope with recurrent academic failure. All of the students in the study had developed strategies for protecting their self-esteem. Using Harter's theory of coping with discrepancies between performance and standards, we distinguish four strategies:…

Special education programs for low achievers may not always be the right choice. Early identification and intervention could significantly reduce overdependence on special education. The authors reviewed pertinent literature related to the benefits of referral and placement in special education settings, and proposed strategies that would help low…

Self-worth protective students characteristically perform well on some occasions yet on other occasions they perform poorly. In this study, two accounts of the poor performance of self-worth protective students are assessed. The first is that their poor performance is an outcome of evaluative threat. The second is that their poor performance is an…

The authors examined self-handicapping prior to academic-oriented tasks in children with and without ADHD and examined whether stimulant medication influenced self-handicapping. Participants were 61 children ages 6 to 13, including 22 children with ADHD tested after taking a placebo, 21 children with ADHD tested after taking stimulant medication,…

In this article, the authors examine the influence of attribution styles on the development of mathematical talent. The study employs a Self-Confidence Attitude Attribute Scale questionnaire, which measures ability and effort attributions. Participants are three groups of highly, moderately, or mildly mathematically gifted Finnish adolescents and…

This article presents the author's response to "Excessive Positivism in Person-Centered Planning," by Steve Holburn and Christine D. Cea. The author begins by complementing Holburn and Cea on their courage to voice concerns that perhaps may not appear to be politically correct or perhaps too bold to express in the context of a journal like…

Since the enactment of the federally funded Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) program, students considered at risk of school failure have received increasing attention. Identification and treatment of students considered at risk often emphasize the risk behaviors themselves. The traditional medical model assumes there is a disease entity or…

The authors examined cultural differences in parents' responses to their children's performance. In Study 1 (N=421), Chinese 5th graders reported that their parents de-emphasized their academic success and emphasized their academic failure, whereas their American counterparts reported that their parents did the opposite. This partially accounted…

This study examined gender differences in the interactions early adolescent students report having with significant others following academic failure and the consequences of these interactions for student worry. The 5th- through 8th-grade students (N = 297) reported on their general strategies for coping with academic failure, the nature of their…

This study of grade-level advancement/retention policies and procedures in 10 school districts shows how retention policy and procedure are disconnected from retention research. Administrators and teachers experience ethical dilemmas when district policy and prescribed practice collide with realities that underlie student failure. However, acts of…

This study examines the role of self beliefs in the self-regulatory engagement of 1,304 middle school students in Singapore. Developing academic self-regulatory skills is particularly critical for these students when the syllabi are more cognitively demanding and regulation of one's behaviour towards effective learning is increasingly called upon…

"Cooling out" was identified in 1960 as a specific function of the community college in redirecting students who experienced academic failure. The "soft" cooling out process, which re-directs students into less demanding curricula or out of the college through counseling and advising rather than academic discipline, will increasingly become a…

This paper empirically examines one aspect of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of educational failure, a code thesis wherein a restricted code is defined as giving access only to "particularistic" meanings and an elaborated code is defined as giving access also to "universalistic" meanings. According to Bernstein,…

The main aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of why students abandon their studies, or perform less well than expected given their high school grades, and to develop predictive models that can help identify those students most at-risk at the time they enter college. This will allow teachers and those responsible for student…