Identification of Underachievers, Normal Achievers and Overachievers in Science

Underachievement refers to the case that a student attains a level of achievement that is below his or her potential. Academic under-achievement can also be attributed to relatively intelligent or gifted students, who do not perform as expected either because they are bored or choose not to excel. The pilot study was carried out on 1684 students of 9th standard selected randomly from 18 secondary schools of Faridabad district of Haryana. Achievement test in science prepared and standardized by the investigator was administered to know the achievement of 9th standard students in science subjects. Thereafter, Advance Progressive Matrices Set I and Set II developed by J.C. Raven were administered to the same students to measure their intelligence. The raw scores of achievement test in science and intelligence test were converted into standard scores. All those students who obtained at least 1 δ less score on achievement tests in science in comparison to the score obtained in intelligence test were counted. Thus 402 students were selected as underachievers in science. Descriptive statistics and t-test were used to analysis the data. The result revealed that there is a significant difference in the ratio of underachievers in science among the students studying in Government and Government -Aided schools.