Abstract
The paper reports on teachers' thinking about school failure and what type of children are failing. Analyses of interviews and teacher questionnaires about individual children were compared with the results of student didactic tests and tests of cognitive ability.
Teachers see the sources of difference between successful and unsuccessful children especially in their cognitive dispositions and school performance. A link between perceptions of children's school failure and their performance on cognitive and didactic tests has been demonstrated.
Nevertheless, teachers resist the use of the school failure concept.