Teaching Boys Who Struggle in School: Strategies That Turn Underachievers into Successful Learners responds to growing concerns about a crisis in boys' academic achievement. Kathleen Palmer Cleveland seeks to help K-12 educators cut through the hype to get at the real problem: who is underachieving, why are they struggling, and how can educators respond to these students' needs in new and productive ways? Cleveland presents findings from four large-scale studies about how boys learn best and combines these findings with insights about ongoing social and learning-style factors that affect learning in the classroom, plus lesson plans and anecdotes from real teachers working across all grade levels and subject areas. Cleveland's Pathways to Re-Engagement represents the culmination of her substantial research and personal experience. A flexible and practical framework for decision making in the classroom, the Pathways model seeks to * Replace the underachieving boy's negative attitudes about learning; * Reconnect each boy with school, with learning, and with a belief in himself as a competent learner; * Rebuild learning skills that lead to success in school and in life; and * Reduce the need for unproductive and distracting behaviors as a means of self-protection. Each aspect of the Pathways to Re-Engagement model offers educators a way to move underachieving boys from a position of weakness toward one of strength--giving them the tools to succeed in school and beyond.

The Other Three R’s model began as an American Psychological Association (APA) initiative, sponsored by Robert J. Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and Past President of the APA. For both this initiative and this edited volume, Sternberg assembled a diverse team of experts who identified reasoning, resilience and responsibility as three learnable skills that, when taken together, have great potential for increasing academic success. The authors of this volume present in detail their evidence-based arguments for promoting TOTRs in schools as a way to optimize student success.

The third volume of the collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi covers his work on the application of flow in areas that go beyond the field of leisure where the concept was first applied. Based on his personal experience with schooling and learning, as well as that of many others and contrary to what Cicero claimed, Csikszentmihalyi arrived at the conclusion that instead of taking pride in making the roots of knowledge as bitter as possible, we should try to make them sweeter. Just as flow became a popular and useful concept in voluntary activities, it could likewise be applied in education with the end result of young people being more likely to continue learning not just because they have to but because they want to. This volume brings together a number of articles in which Csikszentmihalyi develops ideas about how to make education and more generally the process of learning to live a good life, more enjoyable. Since theory is the mother of good practice, the first eleven chapters are devoted to theoretical reflections. Some are general and explore what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a person, when we look at life from the perspective of flow. Others are more narrowly focused on such topics as consumption, education, teaching and learning. They help laypeople reflect how they can arrange their lives in such a way as to leave a small ecological footprint while getting the most enjoyment. The second section of the volume contains a dozen empirical articles on similar topics. They deal with the development of identity and self-worth; with the formation of goals and motivation; with loneliness and family life.

The underachievement of gifted students is a well-documented problem in educational research. This study employed an experimental design to determine whether an existing personal goal setting intervention could successfully improve academic attitudes and achievement in a sample of 44 high school gifted underachievers, as well as determine if any patterns existed in students' goal writing exercises. The goal setting intervention included two after-school goal setting sessions for a duration of approximately three hours, whereby students individually reflected on and wrote about personal and academic goals. Students completed three measures of academic attitudes pre-intervention, one-day post-intervention, and three-months post-intervention: the School Attitude Assessment Survey - Revised, the Future Orientation Scale, and the Theory of Intelligence Survey. Achievement data in the form of grade point average was additionally collected for the semester pre-intervention as well as the semester immediately following the intervention. ANOVA results indicated that treatment students experienced significantly higher academic self-perceptions on the School Attitude Assessment Survey and significantly higher gains in grade point averages over the control group. Examination of students' writing revealed that students cited time management as their largest impediment to improving their academic performance. Surprisingly, analysis of student writing indicated that participants in this sample identified themselves as underachievers, but not as gifted. Recommendations from the findings include implementing goal setting curriculum during the regular school day to allow students to monitor their goal progress under the guidance of a teacher or counselor over a longer duration to assist them in goal pursuit.