Persistence and academic performance in higher education: a comparison between students with and without reported learning disabilities

ABSTRACT

The few existing studies in international literature about students with learning disabilities’ postsecondary persistence and academic performances show varied outcomes. Rigorous research has been limited. Moreover, in Italy there is a dearth of public data on students’ careers and clearly a deficiency regarding literature on this topic. To tackle this situation, propensity score matching techniques were used in this paper to compare data about persistence and academic success of students who reported a learning disability with those who did not, all enrolled in a large University in Northern Italy. Once potential confounders were taken into account, our findings indicated that students with an attested learning disability were as likely to persist in academic context as peers without any LD. However, for what concerns academic performances, the outcomes varied according to the measures being used. Although there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of the number of course credits (ECTS) earned, students with learning disabilities continued to lag behind their counterparts without disabilities concerning first-year grade point average achieved. This paper includes final recommendations for future research, in order to fill existing gaps in methodology and area of study.

KEYWORDS:

• Persistence
• academic performance
• students with learning disabilities
• postsecondary education
• propensity score matching

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by Professor Marisa Pavone, Rector’s Delegate for students with disabilities at the University of Turin and current President of the National University Conference for Rectors’ Disability Delegates.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Both authors have collaborated in the writing process of this paper; Rosa Bellacicco for the paragraphs Literature Review and Purpose of the study and methods; while Tania Parisi for the paragraphs Introduction and Results. Both authors wrote the paragraph Discussion.

2 The only national study that has tried to investigate the issue in Italy, by Censis (2017), reported data on the careers and the completion of studies of students with disabilities enrolled in 32 universities, during the academic year 2014/2015. Nevertheless, this research only involves students registered at Disability Service and it lacks comparison with data on students without disabilities. Furthermore, the study does not consider students’ backgrounds nore in-university factors associated with their careers.

3 Copyright (c) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

R. Bellacicco

Rosa Bellacicco is a researcher in Special Education at the University of Turin (Italy). Her research interests focus on the inclusion of students with disabilities in higher education and their transition to employment.

T. Parisi

Tania Parisi is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Turin (Italy). Her main research interests are in methodology of social research, social inequality and models of social change.