NCJ Number
149183
Journal
Equity and Excellence Volume: 25 Issue: 1 Dated: special issue (Fall 1991) Pages: 25-29
Date Published
1991
Length
5 pages
Annotation
Existing research into student dropouts has indicated that poor academic performance at an early age and grade retention at the elementary school level predict multiple problem behaviors in older students, especially those who are disadvantaged.
Abstract
These findings suggest that improving the academic achievement of low-achieving students could help educators reduce the dropout rate, and may also positively affect trends in substance abuse, adolescent pregnancy, and suicide. Practitioners suggest that teachers implement various strategies designed to facilitate student megacognitive behavior by helping students learn to read, think aloud, plan strategies, develop student questions, and restate ideas. Attribution theorists believe that students' perceptions of the causes of their successes and failures will influence their future achievement. Teachers need to motivate students to approach success by attributing their successes to ability and their failures to lack of effort. In contrast, students who adopt a failure-avoiding approach will ascribe success to luck or lack of task difficulty, and failure to inability. 38 references