It is interesting to note that medium compulsives in the unstructured schools made the lowest achievement scores (although not significantly lower). Possibly their compulsivity was not strong enough to cause them to build their own structure.

Our conjecture is, then, that regardless of the manner in which school lessons are taught, the compulsive child accentuates those elements of each lesson that aid him in systematizing his work. When helped by a high degree of structure in lesson presentation, then, and only then, does such a child attain unusual success.

The statistical analyses of achievement in relation to anxiety and teaching methods and the interactions of the two are presented in Tables 3 and 4. Figure 2 is a graph of the mean achievement scores of each group. As predicted, the highly anxious children in the unstructured schools score more poorly (** f) than those in the structured schools. The interaction effect, which is significant at the.01 level, can be seen best in the contrast of mean scores. While high anxiety children achieve significantly less well (** f) in the unstructured school than do low anxiety children, they appear to do at least as well as the average in the structured classroom.

The most striking aspect of the interaction demonstrated is the marked decrement in performance suffered by the highly anxious children in unstructured schools. According to the theory proposed, this is a consequence of the severe condition of perceived threat that persists unabated for the anxious child in an ambiguous sort of school environment. The fact that such threat is potent in the beginning reading lessons is thought to be a vital factor in the continued pattern of failure or under-achievement these children exhibit. The child with high anxiety may first direct his anxiety released energy toward achievement, but because his distress severely reduces the abilities of discrimination and memorization of complex symbols, the child may fail in his initial attempts to master the problem. Failure confirms the threat, and the intensity of anxiety is increased as the required learning becomes more difficult, so that by the time the child reaches the third grade the decrement in performance is pronounced.