This paper examined the many facets that have made the High Point Model a successful charter school. First and foremost, addressing and improving the attitudes and perceptions students have of school will lead to improved learning. Other valuable considerations that will prepare the way for academic success and promote deeper and more meaningful learning by the students include: the need for educational change and how that change led to the charter school movement; the essential elements of a supportive environment and how that environment helps students learn; the value of a project-based approach to teaching and learning; the benefits of a non-graded format; the use of standards-based assessment; the creation of a technology rich environment and its impact on student learning and achievement; and the role of students in creating the school community and climate.

This monograph analyses and describes successful educational actions with a specific focus on vulnerable groups (i.e. youth, migrants, cultural groups e.g. Roma, women, and people with disabilities). Concrete data that shows success in school performance in subject matters such as math or language will be provided, as well as children, teachers and families accounts of the impact of this success. Alongside, there is an analysis of the relationship between these children’s educational performance with their inclusion or exclusion from different areas of society (i.e. housing, health, employment, and social and political participation). Many studies have already diagnosed and described the causes of educational and social exclusion of these vulnerable groups. This monograph, however, provides solutions, that is, actions for success identified through the INCLUD-ED project, thus providing both, contrasted data and solid theoretical background and development. Some examples of these actions are interactive groups (or heterogeneous grouping in the classroom with reorganisation of human resources), extension of the learning time, homework clubs, tutored libraries, family and community educative participation, family education, or dialogic literary gatherings. All these actions have been defined as successful educational actions, which mean that they lead to both efficiency and equity. Finally, recommendations for policy and practice are included and discussed.

In response to the continued pressure placed on American public schools to increase academic achievement, some schools have begun to reorganize instructional environments in an effort to improve student outcomes. The current study examined one such elementary school that implemented a departmentalized model of instruction in fourth and fifth-grade classrooms in an effort to improve student learning. This longitudinal, cross-sectional study followed a sample of students and teachers over a two-year period in an attempt to ascertain how departmentalizing in the elementary school affected student and teacher perceptions and academic achievement among students in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade. Student perceptions of their school, teachers, peers, and academic performance were measured using surveys and standardized achievement test scores were collected. Teacher attitudes toward departmentalization were also measured using surveys. A factor analysis of student survey results with Varimax rotation resulted in ten factors that revealed a consistent pattern of change in student perceptions when correlated. A consistent relationship between students' academic achievement and perceptions at each grade level was not found. Results suggested that students who began switching classes in elementary school had positive perceptions of their teachers and of themselves as social beings in school. Perceptions of their academic abilities, however, separated from their perceptions of their teachers over time. In contrast, students with one teacher in self-contained classrooms had positive perceptions of their teachers. These students' perceptions of their academic abilities and perceptions of themselves as social beings in school were connected to their perceived teacher-student relationships. Elementary teachers expressed concern over meeting their students' emotional needs, but otherwise reported positive attitudes toward their abilities to teach and meet their students' academic needs in a departmentalized setting. Teachers at the elementary school and the middle school felt that students who switched classes in elementary school were more prepared when they got to middle school and adjusted more quickly than students who came from self-contained elementary classrooms.

In this book, authors discuss research and theory on the social psychological forces that shape academic achievement. A key focus is to show how psychological principles can be used to foster achievement and make schooling a more enjoyable process. Topics are highly relevant to both social and educational psychology, with discussions of core concepts such as intelligence, motivation, self-esteem and self-concept, expectations and attributions, prejudice, and interpersonal and intergroup relations.

It is becoming increasingly clear that non-cognitive psychological processes are important for students’ school achievement, even to the point where their influence may be stronger than that exerted by the parents, teachers, or the school atmosphere itself. Non-cognitive psychological variables refer to varieties of self-beliefs and goal orientations – such as anxiety, confidence, self-efficacy, and self-concept – which are often seen as dispositional and motivational in nature. It is particularly important to highlight the role that confidence and self-efficacy play in school achievement, as these two self-beliefs are related to metacognitive processing – the awareness of what you know and what you do not know. Self-concept, meanwhile, tends to exert its influence on an individual’s choice of tertiary level courses. This book suggests that by focusing on students’ self-beliefs, the education system may be in a position to improve cognitive performance, since individual students’ self-beliefs may be more malleable than the cognitive processes involved in acquiring academic knowledge. Focusing on these non-cognitive psychological processes is also likely to be more effective in improving performance than system-wide interventions involving changes in policy for both public and private sector educators. This book will be useful to educational researchers, school leaders, administrators, counsellors, and teachers, in guiding students’ attitudes towards learning and school performance. It will also provide students in psychology and education with broad and nuanced insights into the drivers of school achievement. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Psychology.