Prevention of Academic Failure Research Paper

This sample Prevention of Academic Failure Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Free research papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality research paper on any topic at affordable price please use custom research paper writing services.

Abstract

Prevention  of academic  failure  is a serious  challenge because children who fail academically experience significant social and economic challenges throughout their lives. Causes of academic failure include familial, socioeconomic,  and cultural  issues that lead to a lack of readiness  for  school,  academic,  instructional,   and motivational  problems  as well as physiological, cognitive, and  neurological  barriers  to learning. Attempts   to   help   students   who   are   experiencing academic failure fall into three  categories: prevention, intervention,  and  remediation.  Preventive  approaches aim to stop academic failure before it occurs. Early intervention   programs  aim  to  catch  children  during key developmental  periods  and facilitate development and readiness skills. Remediation programs are usually applied  when  students  have  demonstrated  significant skill deficits and are experiencing  significant academic failure. Special education programs often take this form, as do other kinds of academic accommodations  for students identified with special needs.

Outline

  1. Defining Academic Failure
  2. Causes of Academic Failure
  3. Preventing Early School Failure
  4. Preventing Failure in the Intermediate Grades and Middle School
  5. Preventing Academic Failure in High School
  6. Conclusion

1. Defining Academic Failure

A lot depends  on children’s success in school—their self-esteem, their sense of identity, their future employability.   Preventing   academic   failure  means that we, as a society, are much more likely to produce individuals  who feel confident  about  their  ability to contribute  to the common good, whose literacy skills are competent, and who are able to hold jobs successfully. Thus, prevention  of academic failure should be a primary concern for any society. But exactly what is meant by academic failure? What does the term connote? Generations of schoolchildren  since the 1920s, when  the  system  of grade  progression  began,  have equated  academic  failure  with  retention   in  grade. School failure meant literally failing to progress onto the next grade, with the assumption that the skills and knowledge  taught  in  that  grade had  not  been  mastered. To have flunked multiple grades quickly led to quitting school altogether—the ultimate academic failure.

More recently, academic failure has come to mean a failure to acquire the basic skills of literacy. Students who were unable to read at a functional level, to communicate  effectively through  writing, and to complete basic math calculations were seen as representing a  failure  of the  academic  system  even  though  they might  hold  high  school  diplomas.  The  practice  of moving students  on from one grade to the next even though they might not have mastered basic competencies associated with lower grade levels is often referred to as social promotion.  This type of academic failure led to calls for an increased emphasis on basic skills, that is, the ‘‘three R’s’’—reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic—in public education. Partly in reaction to emphasis on basic skills, a third interpretation of academic failure has also emerged. In this view, academic failure occurs  not  only when  students  fail to master basic skills but  also when  they  emerge from  school without  the ability to think  critically, problem  solve, learn independently, and work collaboratively with others—a  skill set deemed necessary for success in a digital age. This underachievement  symbolizes a significant loss of intellectual capital for a culture. Finally, statistics show that students who do not complete high school are much more likely to need welfare support, have difficulties with the law and police, and struggle economically and socially throughout their lives. Thus, academic failure ultimately  means both the failure to acquire  the skill sets expected  to be learned  and the failure  to  acquire  official documentation   of achievement by the school system.

2. Causes Of Academic Failure

Students struggle academically for many reasons, including  familial, socioeconomic, and cultural  issues that  lead to a lack of readiness  for school, academic, instructional,  and motivational problems as well as physiological,  cognitive, and  neurological  barriers  to learning. Early school failure often occurs because children  enter the structured  school environment  not ready to learn.

2.1.  School Readiness

School readiness refers to the idea that children need a certain set of skills to learn and work successfully in school. Often this term refers to whether or not children  have reached  the  necessary  emotional,  behavioral,   and   cognitive   maturity   to   start   school   in addition  to how well they would adapt to the classroom environment.  To create some consensus  about when  a child  should  begin  school,  states  designate a specific cutoff date. If a child reaches a certain age by the  cutoff (usually  5 years for kindergarten  and 6 years for first grade),  the child may begin school. However, cutoff dates are arbitrary and vary considerably across nations,  and age is not the best determinant  or most accurate  measure  of whether  or not  a child is ready to begin school. Research has suggested that we must look at all aspects of children’s lives— their cognitive, social, emotional, and motor development—to  get an accurate  idea of their  readiness  to enter school. Most important,  children’s readiness for school is affected by their early home, parental,  and preschool experiences.

Stated in its simplest form, school readiness means that a child is ready to enter a social environment  that is focused primarily on education. The following list of behaviors and characteristics are often associated with school readiness:

  • Ability to follow structured daily routines
  • Ability to dress independently
  • Ability to work independently with supervision
  • Ability to listen and pay attention to what someone else is saying
  • Ability to get along with and cooperate with other children
  • Ability to play with other children
  • Ability to follow simple rules
  • Ability to work with puzzles, scissors, coloring, paints, and the like
  • Ability to write own name or to acquire the skill with instruction
  • Ability to count or acquire skills with instruction
  • Ability to recite the alphabet
  • Ability to identify both shapes and colors
  • Ability to identify sound units in words and to recognize rhyme

Family  environment  is very important  in  shaping children’s early development. Some family factors that can influence school readiness include low family economic risk (poor readiness for school is associated with poverty),  stable family structure  (children  from stable   two-parent    homes   tend   to   have   stronger school  readiness  than  do  children  from  one-parent homes and from homes where caregivers change frequently),  and  enriched  home  environment  (children from homes where parents talk with their children, engage them in conversation, read to them, and engage in forms of discipline  such as ‘‘time-out’’ that  encourage self-discipline have stronger readiness skills).

Children’s readiness to read, in particular, has gained greater attention  from educators  recently as the developmental precursors to reading have become more evident. During the preschool  years, children  develop emerging literacy skills—preacademic  skills that allow children  to develop  a disposition  to read,  write,  and compute.  Children  are ready to read when they have developed an ear for the way in which words sound and can identify rhyme and alliteration, blend sounds, recognize onset rime (initial sounds), and identify sound units in words. Together, these skills are called phonological awareness and usually emerge in children between 2 and 6 years of age. Children with good phonological awareness skills usually learn to read quickly. Children  who are poor readers have weak phonological skills, and children   who  do  not  learn  to  read  fail  in  school. Another  important  readiness  skill that  helps  children to learn to read is called print awareness. Print awareness means that children are capable of the following:

  • Knowing the difference between pictures and print
  • Recognizing environmental print (e.g., stop signs, McDonald’s, Kmart)
  • Understanding that print can appear alone or with pictures
  • Recognizing that print occurs in different media (e.g., pencil, crayon, ink)
  • Recognizing that print occurs on different surfaces (e.g., paper, computer screen, billboard)
  • Understanding that words are read right to left
  • Understanding that the lines of text are read from top to bottom
  • Understanding the function of white space between words
  • Understanding that the print corresponds to speech word for word
  • Knowing the difference between letters and words

Children also need to learn book-handling skills such as orienting a book correctly and recognizing the beginning and the end of a book. Children who begin school without these basic readiness skills are at risk for school failure. The use of screening  assessments  during  preschool and kindergarten  to identify students  who may be at risk for academic failure, particularly  in the area of phonemic awareness, has been shown to be a sound method of predicting which children will have difficulty in learning to read. Most likely to be retained in kindergarten are children  who are chronologically young for their  grade, developmentally  delayed, and/or  living in poverty.

2.2.  Academic, Instructional, and Motivational Reasons

Children who do not master basic reading skills, specifically the ability to automatically decode new words and build a sight word vocabulary that leads to fluency, experience academic failure. By third grade, learning to read has become reading to learn. In other words, in third grade  the  curriculum   becomes  focused  much  less on teaching  students  to acquire  the basic tools of literacy (reading,  writing,  and computing)  and much  more on using  those  tools  to  learn  content,  express  ideas,  and solve problems.  At this point,  students  are likely to be given content textbooks in science and social studies and to read nonfiction for the purpose of gaining new information. Thus, the inability to read effectively and to learn to study independently  often leads to failure at the elementary and middle school levels and also creates profound motivation problems at the high school level that contribute to the ultimate school failure—dropping out. The inability to master key concepts in pivotal classes such as algebra, now typically taken  at the middle or junior high school level, often limits students’ ability to proceed in coursework. Students may fail to understand algebraic  concepts  due  to  their  developmental  level. (Many students  are stilling thinking  in concrete terms in middle school and have not yet moved into a stage of cognitive thinking allowing them to understand  formal logic and manipulate symbols—a developmental source of failure.) In addition,  some students  might not have automatized basic arithmetic skills, particularly computing with fractions—an academic or instructional failure. Some students may have become turned off to math and accepted  self-images that  permit  poor  math  skills— a motivational  failure. Finally, many students  will fail algebra for all of these reasons, and the impact will often be that they will finish school in a nonacademic or basic track or might even drop out.

Thus, academic and instructional  reasons for school failure  include  the  effectiveness of the  instruction   a student  has  received  and  the  quality  of remediation strategies  or  programs  available.  The  following  is  a typical example  that  illustrates  academic and  instructional reasons for school failure. A teacher reports that a student is having difficulty in getting beyond the primer level in reading and is being considered  for retention. The child was assessed as having average intelligence. No behavioral or attention problems were noted. Closer inspections of the student’s reading skills indicated that she had poor phonological skills and was not profiting from the type of classroom reading instruction  she was receiving  that  depended  heavily on  auditory  phonics instruction  stressing ‘‘sounding out words’’ and matching sound–symbol  connections.  Appropriate  interventions  included  using  techniques  to  build  up  a  sight word vocabulary through repetition and distributed learning and introducing  the student to a visual decoding system to provide  her  with a method  for reading unknown  words by analyzing the words and breaking them down into more familiar visual units.

2.3.  Physiological, Neurological, and Cognitive Reasons

Imagine a child spending  most of the year in kindergarten with an undetected hearing loss that has made it very  difficult  for  her  to  benefit  from  instruction. Imagine another child in first grade struggling to learn because her vision impairment  has not been caught or corrected. Similarly, students suffering from a variety of conditions  and  illnesses, such  as childhood  diabetes, asthma  and  allergy-related  problems,  and  sickle cell anemia, may have difficulty in maintaining energy and attention  in  school  due  to  chronic  fatigue  and  the impact of medications. Children  may also suffer from orthopedic or motor impairments that make it difficult for them  to explore  their  environment,  interact  with others, and/or master tasks that demand motor skills.

Students who suffer from various kinds of neurological disorders  or  learning  disabilities  may also  have cognitive learning problems  that  make it difficult for their  brains  to process  information,  interpret  sounds and symbols efficiently in reading, calculate and understand  number concepts, and/or write effectively. Other  children  may have  cognitive  deficits,  such  as mental  retardation,  that  limit  their  ability to  absorb and  apply  regular   classroom  instruction.   Children with attention deficit disorders have difficulty in directing and maintaining  their attention,  may exhibit impulsive behavior, and have trouble in interacting independently  in typical classroom environments without support. Specialized and/or special education interventions are designed to provide individualized strategies and approaches  for students  who have physiological-based  learning   problems   interfering   with their ability to learn.

3. Preventing Early School Failure

3.1.  Early  Intervention Programs

Programmatic interventions may include developing screening  programs  to  identify  children  at  risk  for school failure and to ensure  early access to readiness programs already available in the school or community such  as Head Start. Many states are now developing guidelines for children  age 6 years or under  based on the National  Association for the Education  of Young Children’s (NAEYC) list of developmentally appropriate practices.  The major  challenge facing early intervention  programs  is to provide  developmentally  and individually appropriate  learning environments  for all children.  Essential ingredients  to successful preschool experiences include small group and individualized teacher-directed   activities  as  well  as  child-initiated activities. Quality programs recognize the importance of play and view teachers as facilitators of learning.

3.2.  Preventing School  Failure in the  Elementary Grades

Full  day kindergarten  (as opposed  to half day) programs provide more time for field trips, activity centers,  projects,  and  free  play.  At-risk  students   who attend  rigorous  yet nurturing  full day programs have a  greater  chance  of  experiencing  academic  success. Full  day  kindergarten   programs  help  increase  academic achievement as well as decrease the number  of children retained in the early elementary grades. Research shows  that  full day kindergarten  programs for children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds  lead  to  stronger  achievement  in  basic skill areas and generally better preparation  for first grade.

Table I summarizes the research on full-day kindergarten. Any decisions about whether or not to schedule full or half-day programs should recognize that what a child  is doing  during  the  kindergarten  day  is more important  than the length of the school day.

The instructional  technology that enables classroom teachers to meet the needs of students of different skill levels is already available, but in many cases teachers do not have access to that technology.  Reading interventions that  provide intensive,  early, and individualized  help  that  targets  a  child’s specific  weaknesses (e.g., Success for All, Reading Recovery, Direct Instruction)  have been shown to be effective in reducing  early  reading   failure.  Instructional   approaches such as mastery learning, adaptive education, team teaching, cooperative learning, peer tutoring, and curriculum-based   assessment  are  methods  that  have been shown to produce  academic gains in students  of all achievement levels in the elementary grades. Recently, technology has offered greater individualization of instruction  and increased flexibility in allowing students  to progress at their own pace and to respond to instruction.

Prevention of Academic Failure Research Paper t1TABLE I Research Summary: Full-Day Versus Half-Day Kindergarten Programming

4. Preventing Failure In The Intermediate Grades And Middle School

Remedial programs,  such  as the  Title I programs, have also been used to remediate early skill deficits in reading and math. However, developing intervention  programs,  such  as  after-school  tutoring  and summer  school  courses,  might  not  be  sufficient  to make up serious deficits in short amounts of time and cannot take the place of preventive systemic approaches. The use of learning strategies instruction  has been shown  to be very effective in improving  study  skills and  performance  in middle  school  students.  Because unsuccessful  middle  school students  often lack basic strategic learning skills, intervention  programs should also target these areas. Similarly, approaches  that use learning, problem-solving,  and memory strategies are the most effective interventions  in terms of producing actual gains in student  achievement in the classroom.

5. Preventing Academic Failure In High School

At the  secondary  level, development  of reentry  programs  for  dropouts   and  alternative  education   programs, such as those that combine teaching skills with job training,  are essential to prevent further  academic failure. Research on academic failure at the secondary level has generally examined the relationships between grade retention  and attendance,  suspension,  and self-concept, with an emphasis on the correlation between retention  and  dropout  rates. Academic failure at the high school level is related to attendance  and suspension rates. In general, students  who are failing do not attend school on a regular basis. In addition,  students who have been retained prior to the secondary level are less likely to attend school on a regular basis in junior and senior high school. Furthermore, regardless of the grade in which  retention  occurs,  secondary  students who have been retained often exhibit low self-esteem.

Many studies have reported  that students  who drop out are five times more likely to have repeated a grade than are students who eventually graduate. Being retained  twice virtually guarantees that a student  will drop out of school, and grade retention alone has been identified as the single most powerful predictor of dropping  out. The dropout  rate of overage students  is appreciably higher than  the dropout  rate of regularly promoted  students  when reading  achievement  scores are equivalent for the two groups. Even in high socioeconomic  school  districts,  where  students   are less likely  to  leave school,  a  significant  increase  in dropout  rates has been found for retained students.

Successful programs  at the  high  school  level often have two characteristics:  (a)  one  or more  individuals who  develop  relationships  with  students  individually and monitor their progress carefully and (b) some mechanism  to allow students  who have failed courses and lost credits to regain these credits in quicker than normal  time,  allowing for graduation  at the  expected time. Simply put, successful programs must address the motivational issues that have developed by adolescence and the lack of academic achievement identity typically present  in  students  who  drop  out  of school.  School to-work  programs  that combine vocational counseling with on-the-job experience are successful ways in which to increase a sense of academic competence while connecting to students’ current self-concepts and needs.

6. Conclusion

Attempts to help students  who are experiencing  academic failure fall into three categories: prevention, intervention,  and remediation.  Preventive approaches aim to  stop  academic  failure  before it  occurs.  Early intervention  programs  from  birth  to  5 years of age, for example, aim to catch children  during  key developmental periods and facilitate development and readiness skills. Intervention  programs, such as Robert Slavin’s Success for All program,  aim to intervene  as soon as students begin to show signs of slipping behind their  peers.  Intervention  plans  may also be designed under  Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates  accommodations  in the instructional environment  for students  who have physical or neurological problems that may interfere with their ability to learn or succeed in a typical classroom. Remediation  programs  are usually applied  when students have demonstrated  significant skill deficits and are experiencing  significant academic failure. Special education  programs often take this form, as do other kinds of academic accommodations  for students  identified with special needs.

Of course, early identification and prevention of academic problems  is always preferable to later intervention and remediation.  Thus, systemic solutions that target early reading deficits, independent  learning skills, and   motivational   problems   from   a   developmental perspective are essential to the prevention  of academic failure. Working to change school practices will require sharing the research with educators, conducting evaluations on the outcomes of alternative interventions at the local level, and lobbying at the state level to promote changes in policy and to advocate for alternative service delivery systems that  more effectively meet the needs of students experiencing school failure. Successful programs  to  boost  student  achievement,  however,  must attack underachievement  in three key areas. These key areas—early reading intervention,  acquisition of strategic learning and study skills, and motivation to achieve—are highly related to school failure.

First, acquisition of basic reading skills must be addressed.  If  students   underachieve   in  the  primary grades,  it  is  most  often  because  they  have  failed  to learn to read. Kindergarten  screenings should  include an assessment of phonological awareness. Children identified with weak skills should be targeted for intervention through phonological awareness training in kindergarten.  Prekindergarten  programs for high-risk students are recommended.  Students should be tracked using curriculum-based  assessments of oral reading in the primary grades. Any student  who falls behind  the average rate of acquisition  for his or her class should receive an individualized  analysis of reading skill and additional  after-school intervention  based on that analysis to allow the student  to ‘‘catch up’’ to classmates. This early, intensive, and individualized intervention allows for all students to enter the intermediate  grades as able readers. Some students with special needs might not progress at the same rate as their  classmates, but they too will benefit from early reading interventions.

Second, students must acquire independent  learning and  study  skills during  the  intermediate  and  middle school years if they are to maximize achievement and be competitive  in the job market  of tomorrow.  Many students  underachieve  in middle school because they lack the organizational and learning strategies to master the demands of the upper grades. Embedded approaches to strategy instruction  facilitate generalization and encourage students  to use all of their mental tools. Assessment of students’ study  skills and  metacognitive development  (i.e., the degree to which they are aware of and control their own cognitive processes) leads directly to specific interventions.

Third,  students  in high  school  often underachieve because they lack the motivation to excel academically. They often have failed to incorporate pictures of themselves as successful students  into  their  self-concepts. Through  a variety of approaches,  including  staff in service, a study skills coach approach to peer tutoring, and  an individualized  profile of each student’s study style and vocational options, increased academic competence and a value for academic work can be built.

References:

  1. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn. Washington, DC: National  Academy of the Sciences Press.
  2. Elicker,   (2000).   Full  day  kindergarten:  Exploring  the research. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa International. Gredler, G. (1992).  School readiness: Assessment and educational issues.  Brandon, VT: CPPC Publishing.
  3. Jimerson, S. R. (1999). On the failure of failure: Examining the association between early grade retention  and education and employment  outcomes during  late adolescence. Journal of School Psychology, 37, 243–272.
  4. Minke, K. M., & Bear, G. G. (Eds.). (2000). Preventing school problems, promoting school success: Strategies and programs that work. Silver Spring, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.
  5. National Institute of Child Health and Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Report of the subgroups. Bethesda, MD: Author.
  6. Slavin, R. E., Karweit, N. L., & Madden, N. A. (1989). Effective programs for students at risk. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
  7. Smith, L., &  Shepard,  L. A. (Eds.).  (1989).  Flunking grades:  Research  and  policies on  retention.  New  York: Falmer.
  8. Springfield, S., & Land, D. (Eds.). (2002). Educating at-risk students. Chicago: National Survey of Student Engagement. (Distributed by University of Chicago Press).

See also:

Free research papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to order a custom research paper on any topic and get your high quality paper at affordable price.

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER


Always on-time

Plagiarism-Free

100% Confidentiality
Special offer! Get discount 10% for the first order. Promo code: cd1a428655