RSS Updates
Twitter
Facebook
|
|||||||||||
Elaine M. Allensworth, Ph.D.
Julia
Gwynne, Ph.D.
Holly
Hart, Ph.D.
Joy Lesnick, Ph.D.<< Back to Ask the Expert Home
Ask the Expert Your Question!
Question 2: One of the report findings indicates that students with a physical disability have higher rates of being on track to graduate than students who do not have disabilities. To what do you attribute this? -- What type of follow-up research would shed light on this finding? |
Students in our study with physical/sensory disabilities include students with hearing, visual and orthopedic impairments and other health impairments, such as asthma, diabetes and epilepsy. It is important to note that these students make up a very small proportion of the overall CPS student population. In 2004, just 152 ninth-graders—or 0.6 percent of CPS ninth-graders—were categorized as having physical/sensory disabilities.
Students with physical/sensory disabilities do not have cognitive impairments, which may explain why as a group they out-perform students with other categories of disabilities on nearly every academic measure in our study. The graduation rate for students with physical/sensory disabilities is 75 percent, 17 percentage points higher than students with speech/language disabilities, who have the second-highest graduation rate of any group of students with disabilities. To compare, just 67 percent of students without identified disabilities graduate within four years.
Students with physical/sensory disabilities also have the fewest course failures and the highest GPAs and on-track rates of any group of students, including those without identified disabilities. Sixty-eight percent of students with physical/sensory disabilities are on-track to graduate at the end of their freshman year, compared with 65 percent of students without identified disabilities.
It’s difficult to ascertain why students with physical/sensory disabilities out-perform other students, particularly given their relatively low incoming reading scores. Though students with physical/sensory disabilities have higher eighth-grade reading scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than all other students with disabilities besides those with speech/language disabilities, they have lower incoming scores than students without identified disabilities.
We can only speculate about why students with physical/sensory disabilities out-perform students without disabilities on some measures. One explanation may be the individualized services they receive. Students with physical disabilities are covered either by 504 plans or Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) or both. Students with physical/sensory disabilities most often enter schools with IEPs, so they are receiving individualized attention specific to their learning needs from an early age.
We also know that certain academic behaviors exhibited by students with physical/sensory disabilities are highly correlated with graduation. For students with disabilities, absences are particularly predictive of graduation. Students who miss fewer days of school earn better grades and graduate at higher rates. Students with physical/sensory disabilities miss the same number of days as students without disabilities, and significantly fewer days than most other students with disabilities.
One other notable difference: Students with physical/sensory disabilities have much lower mobility rates than other students. Just 28 percent of students with physical/sensory disabilities registered one or more school moves, compared with 40 percent of all ninth-graders in the sample and 34 percent of students without identified disabilities. These lower mobility rates could account for the higher academic performance.
One possible avenue of further study would be to investigate why students with physical/sensory disabilities miss fewer days of school than students with other disabilities and why they move schools less often.
