Academic Performance of Students With Mental Retardation

Introduction and Research Questions

Legislative support for students with mental retardation ensures that these students have a place within the school system. The access this support provides allows students to pursue more educational options than were previously available to them. It therefore becomes critical that the outcomes resulting from this increased access be examined empirically to determine whether students are benefitting from the best available care. A companion issue raised by greater access to education is whether that access should exist in a specialized environment or within the general school population. While there has been research on this question, the results are not entirely conclusive. Additionally, the question of whether the educational environment influences the delivery and reception of the curriculum must be explored as part of an integrated analysis.

To address these concerns adequately, the following research questions were examined (Kaplan, 1963). First, what courses do students with mental disabilities study? Second, what are the physical and other characteristics of the classroom, and how do these characteristics influence the outcomes of the learning process? Finally, the major consideration is what are the actual academic outcomes of students with learning disabilities? This final question provides the essential basis for examining the success of policy implementation. It also allows researchers to compare the usefulness of different educational environments based on the level of student outcomes.

The subjects for this study were between the ages of 14 and 18 at the time of the study. The degree of mental retardation was determined using a parent-reported assessment of the child across four categories of cognitive functionality: reading common signs, telling the time on an analog clock, counting change, and looking up numbers in a telephone directory (Yu, Newman, & Wagner, 2009). These areas were measured using a combined scale where the lowest value would be 4 and the highest 16 for a child who was fully functional in all areas.

Ninety-four percent of the subjects attended regular schools serving a multiplicity of student types. Four percent attended schools specially designed for students with disabilities, and the remaining 2% attended charter, hospital, or other schools of that nature. Unfortunately, the researchers did not provide information on the demographic characteristics of the sample; the analysis was focused primarily on answering the research questions posed by the study.

Subjects and Sample Characteristics

The research was conducted using secondary data collected for the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2) and from primary data collected through the direct examination of the academic success of youth with mental retardation. Surveys were mailed to staff at the schools from which the NLTS2 sample was drawn. Staff members who had a high degree of awareness of both the student's mental condition and the general program of the school completed the survey. Staff knowledge also extended to special and vocational programs within the school.

Complementing the direct assessment of students was a parental assessment used to determine the level of mental retardation of each student. This provided a useful check for both the validity and reliability of the teacher assessments, forming a basis for data triangulation that allowed the researchers to verify the usefulness and validity of the data collected from the NLTS2 and teachers.

Direct assessment of students was conducted using the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement (WJ III), a specialized measurement tool. Where direct assessment was not possible due to the severity of a student's disability — which may have made following instructions difficult or produced unreliable responses — an adult-reported assessment was used instead.

Research Procedures and Data Collection

The researchers utilized multiple tables and other instruments to present the results clearly. They found that in any given semester, academic classes accounted for 49% of the courses taken by students in the study. Vocational classes accounted for 18% of courses taken, and the remaining 33% comprised non-academic courses such as fine arts and similar electives.

When the different levels of functionality were compared, highly functioning individuals took 55% of their courses as academic classes, a difference that was statistically significant (p < .01). Moderate-functioning individuals took 46% of their classes as academic courses, while low-functioning students took only 40% of their classes in academic settings. Regarding the setting in which courses were taken, 92% of the sample took at least one class in a special education setting, and 69% took at least one class in a general education setting.

The findings demonstrated that students took a diverse range of courses within the semester across both general and special education settings. Students with mental retardation were more likely to take courses in the special education setting rather than the general setting, and this finding was statistically significant. Moderate- and low-functioning students were more likely than their high-functioning counterparts to take classes in a special education environment. Where students were enrolled in general education courses, the academic content was often modified to suit the students' limitations. In the general classroom, students with disabilities were also less likely to participate in class activities than their non-disabled classmates. Notably, in vocational classes there was no significant difference in the instructional experience of students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers.

Results and Key Findings

In general, the majority of students received grades of C or below, and 25% received poor or failing grades. The immediate concern here is that while the instructional experience in some settings is very similar to that of regular students, the outcomes as measured by grades are not equivalent. This suggests that further study is needed to identify the mechanisms that would allow students with disabilities to achieve comparable academic results.

This study was engaging and provided useful descriptive data and analyses of the problem. The study explored an area of considerable practical interest and demonstrated that there is not only a practical difference in curriculum delivery to students with disabilities but that this difference can also be demonstrated statistically.

However, the procedures used by the researchers could have been articulated with greater clarity. In particular, the researchers did not clearly state how adults determined the level of functioning of individual students. Greater transparency on this point would have improved the validity of the assessments and shielded them from accusations of subjectivity. A standardized functional scale should have been developed specifically for determining functionality levels.

The subjects selected for the study were appropriate to the subject matter. They were divided according to level of functionality, and the data were analyzed based on those divisions (Nardi, 2006), which allowed the researchers to provide a more nuanced assessment of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, the gender and socioeconomic status of the subjects were not identified, and these variables could have added an additional layer of analytical sophistication to the work. A more comprehensive study would incorporate analysis by gender and socioeconomic status.