Paraphrase

Balduf

Importance of the Topic

Underachievement is a substantial problem in education, from defining it and its causes to creating purposeful interventions to reverse it. The underachievement of gifted students has been studied for decades (Dowdall & Colangelo, 1982). Reis and McCoach (2000) considered determining the causes of underachievement one of the necessary avenues of research in the field. Neumeister and Hébert (2003) asserted that “educators and researchers need to deconstruct this all-encompassing label of underachievement by looking beyond the underachieving behaviors and, instead, critically examine the attitudes that drive those behaviors” (p. 222). To that end, this study examined gifted underachievers and the reasons their performance did not match their potential. Specifically, this study focused on a group frequently overlooked in gifted underachievement research: college students (Peterson, 2000). These students have been studied, but not to a significant extent.

Essential Questions

The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions. To what factors did first-year college students at an elite university attribute their underachievement, and what interventions or remediation did they feel might reverse that underachievement? The subjects of this study were undergraduates at Queen Mary College¹, specifically those freshmen who, within their first semester, were on academic probation or who had earned an academic warning. Freshmen at Queen Mary College are required to be full-time students, taking an average of 12–18 credits per semester and successfully completing at least 9 of those credits. An academic warning is given to those students whose semester grade point average is less than 2.0. Academic probation is a situation wherein a student’s semester grade point average is less than 2.0 and where fewer than 9 credit hours are earned. Academic warnings and probation are given on a semester basis.

Volume 20 ✤ Number 2 ✤ Winter 2009

279