Underchallenged and overly bored: Why rigor is important in the middle school classroom.

In addition, students enrolled in AVID in both middle and high school earned a significantly higher overall grade point average than those who enrolled in AVID only in high school (Huerta, Watt, & Butcher, 2013). And both programs employ multiple strategies that treat middle school students as practicing professionals and scholars. This dynamic, in which students do not have to work hard to achieve high grades, may lead some students to develop an artificially high academic self-concept and unrealistic expectation for success (Snyder & Garcia, 2013). For example, in one study, only 31% of middle and high school students described receiving even moderately challenging social studies instruction (Saye et al., 2018). [Extracted from the article]

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