Educational underachievement is a major problem for every educational system, with not only personal issues, but also social impacts, leading to disruptions and waste of training costs. The present study was conducted to determine the influencing factors of educational underachievement among talented students.

This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed in 2012-13. The population consisted of all the 53 talented students with educational underachievement in Semnan University of Medical Sciences. A researcher-made questionnaire on educational underachievement was used to collect data, with four fields, student-related, universities and educational environment, Family and Community, and instructors. Validity and reliability of the questionnaire was calculated with content validity and Cronbach's alpha (0.83). The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and t-test.

The most important factors affecting academic performance were lack motivation, pleasure from studying, emotional problems due to incompatibility with the environment, low quality of teaching, non-standardized exam questions, lack of Incentives, Lack of attention to talented students from authorities and lack of proper planning education. In the analysis, the employment of academic failure (P=0.036), living situation (P=0.018), socioeconomic status (P=0.026), disease (P=0.009), parental education (P=0.043), type of Planning (P=0.010), the presence in the classroom (P=0.012) and the current interest in the field (P=0.021), was found to have a significant correlation.

Various factors affect talented students’ educational underachievement.Exploring these factors and providing solutions to educational administrators, seem necessary and are recommended to researchers.