Writing Characteristics of Students With Learning Disabilities and Typically Achieving Peers

Abstract

There is a general consensus that writing is a challenging task for students with learning disabilities (LD). To identify more precisely the extent and depth of the challenges that these students experience with writing, the authors conducted a meta-analysis comparing the writing performance of students with LD to their typically achieving peers. From 53 studies that yielded 138 effect sizes, the authors calculated average weighted effect sizes, showing that students with LD obtained lower scores than their peers on the following writing outcomes: writing quality (–1.06); organization (–1.04); vocabulary (–0.89); sentence fluency (–0.81); conventions of spelling, grammar, and handwriting (–1.14); genre elements (–0.82); output (–0.87); and motivation (–0.42). Implications for research and practice are provided based on these findings.

Do writing motivational beliefs predict middle school students' writing performance?

“…Moreover, while students with disabilities scored lower on the norm‐referenced writing measure than peers without disabilities, the former scored just slightly below the mean on this assessment. This was unexpected, as students with disabilities typically experience considerable difficulty with writing (Graham et al, ). Consequently, additional research is needed to validate that writing attitudes and self‐efficacy account for unique variance in writing performance for students with disabilities.…”

“…These variables included poverty as represented by whether students did or did not receive free/reduced lunch, student's first language (English or another language) and disability status (students were identified as disabled or not). All three of these factors are related to how well students' write (Lee, ; e.g., Graham, Collins, & Rigby‐Wills, ; Mavrogenes & Bezruczko, ). Controlling for gender, free/reduced lunch status, first language, disability status and reading motivational beliefs allowed us to conduct a stringent test of whether writing motivational beliefs predict writing performance.…”

Children Who Are Deaf/Hard of Hearing with Disabilities: Paths to Language and Literacy

“…Background knowledge, memory, and executive functions impact the writing of students with LD [71]. Graham, Collins, and Rigby-Wills [72] conducted a meta-analysis of 53 studies, comparing the writing of students with LD and peers without disabilities. In addition to needing support with all phases of writing, they found that writing "required the orchestration of handwriting, typing, spelling, and sentence construction skills" (Writing characteristics, p. 199) combined with the role of motivation.…”

Effects of Computerized Instruction on the Use of Punctuation Strategies by Students with LD

“…Students with learning disabilities (LD) tend to have a large number of writing deficits compared to their peers (Graham, Collins, & Rigby‐Wills, ; Koutsoftas & Gray, ; Lane & Lewandowski, ; Newcomer & Barenbaum, ; Poplin, Gray, Larsen, Banikowski, & Mehring, ; Troia, ), and these deficits maintain across the grades (Dockrell, Lindsay, Connelly, & Mackie, ; Poplin et al., ) unless these students receive intensive and special instruction (Schumaker & Deshler, ). Indeed, without such instruction, these students do not make appreciable gains in writing over time (Troia, Lin, Monroe, & Cohen, ), and they continue to write at the fourth‐grade level throughout their high‐school years (Warner, Schumaker, Alley, & Deshler, ).…”