For a variety of reasons, some adolescents fail to live up to their apparent potentials, a situation labeled underachievement. Although there may be many domains in which youth fail to achieve, research that focuses on underachievement narrows the domains in which adolescents can fail to live up to their potentials to schooling contexts. And, in schooling contexts, research typically narrows its scope more to intellectually gifted students who fail to do as well as might have been expected. Although research has examined why students underachieve, interventions have tended to focus on students at risk of failing (such as underprivileged youth who fail to complete school) rather than groups of underachievers focused on by the field that studies underachievement (such as gifted and otherwise privileged youth). Still, emerging research provides important insights as to what may work best, and it turns out that some of the most promising interventions focus on students themselves...