Low achieving, low socioeconomic students, because of a multiplicity of little-understood background factors, seem to fail not because of an initial lack of motivation to learn, but because basic learning processes taught them by their own communities are not contiguous with those required for academic success. The study attempts to determine if high-achieving students have developed interrelationships among their cognitive and educative abilities which permit them to acquire cognitive processing systems that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those developed by low-achieving students, and if such relationships define specific areas of curriculum input that would systematically improve the performance of low achieving students. First, two groups of eighth graders were located through background information and a battery of achievement tests: one a high-achieving high socioeconomic group, the other a low-achieving low socioeconomic group. Then correlation techniques were used in an attempt to model the hypothetical cognitive processing systems. It appears from preliminary findings that low achievers exhibit a poor quality of achievement because they retrieve and integrate inappropriate bits of information into inefficient cognitive processing systems. (Author/JM)