Underachievement: a case of conceptual confusion

Although the word underachievement is frequently encountered in educational writing, it is not a well‐defined concept. This paper presents alternative operationalisations of underachievement, one based on a discrepancy between attainment and IQ and generally used by psychologists, the other based on relative position and used more by sociologists. Particular attention is paid to technical aspects of the psychologists' definition, and it is shown that an apparently straightforward approach based on a regression model has many drawbacks. The paper ends by suggesting that educational researchers consider dropping underachievement from their vocabulary.