Statistical Analysis Report:

Profiles of Students with Disabilities as Identified in NELS:88

April 1997

(NCES 97-254) Ordering information

Highlights

• The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), conducted by the (NCES), began with a base-year survey of 8th-grade students in 1988, followed up at 2-year intervals in 1990, 1992, and 1994. Because of its broad scope and longitudinal design, NELS:88 provides an important source of data by which to examine the status and experiences of students as they progress from middle school through the high school years.
• The NELS:88 base-year sample consisted of all U.S. public and private schools containing eighth grades. Excluded from this sample, however, were special education schools, ungraded classrooms, and students determined by local staff to be incapable of participation in the survey for reasons of language or of mental or physical disability. As a result, as many as one-half of the children with disabilities who are served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) were likely excluded from the NELS:88 base-year sample. Further information about how the counts of students with disabilities in the NELS sample compare to counts of students with disabilities under the IDEA and in national longitudinal studies can be found in Appendix A (see also OSEP 1994; Wagner et al. 1993).
• The primary purposes of this report are to identify those students in NELS:88 who had or may have had a disabling condition or received services related to such a condition, and to examine their characteristics and their educational experiences and outcomes, as they progressed from the eighth grade in 1988 into and out of high school in 1992. Another purpose is to examine the alternative perceptions of disability status that are available from the four different respondent groups in NELS:88 (parents, teachers, students, and school officials) and to assess the extent to which these various perceptions affect descriptions of the characteristics, experiences, and outcomes of students with disabilities.

Using NELS:88 to Define Disability Status

• NELS:88 provides four different sources of information related to disability status—parents, teachers, students, and school officials. Each of these sources responded to different items relating to students’ disability status. For example, teacher perceptions of students’ disability status was linked to students’ classroom performance, whereas parental identification was linked to whether or not a student had ever received disability-related services. As a result, all of these data sources produce different estimates of the disabled population of students in grades 8-12.
• The degree of overlap among students who identify themselves or are identified by parents, teachers, or school officials as disabled is often quite low—that is, the populations of students identified as disabled by these different sources appear to be somewhat separate and distinct groups of students. Nonetheless, the patterns of difference between the various disabled and nondisabled student groups that can be identified using NELS:88 data appear rather similar to one another in many respects.

Background Characteristics of Students with Disabilities

• Students identified by teachers or parents as disabled in NELS:88 were more often male, had lower scores on locus of control psychological measures, and were slightly older than students not so identified. Students identified as disabled by teachers were more likely to come from households headed by single females, to have lower individual socioeconomic status (SES) and lower self-esteem, and to have parents with lower levels of education than nondisabled students.

Similar percentages of parent-identified disabled students and students in the nondisabled population were members of minority groups (23.7 and 26.9 percent, respectively). Among students identified as learning disabled by parents and teachers, teacher-identified students were more likely to be black than were parent-identified students (16.6 percent versus 7.9 percent, respectively). Black students were actually underrepresented among those students classified by parents as learning disabled.

Students who identified themselves as disabled were more likely than their nondisabled counterparts to be male (60.8 percent versus 49.7 percent). Self-identified disabled students also scored lower on locus of control psychological measures than did nondisabled students. However, students who identified themselves as disabled were proportionally represented in terms of race and had similar SES status as those students who did not identify themselves as disabled.

The School Experiences of Students with Disabilities

• Compared to students not identified as disabled in NELS:88, students identified by teachers and parents as disabled took more remedial mathematics and English courses, had earned fewer units in core curriculum areas, had more often repeated a grade prior to the eighth grade, and were more likely to have participated in dropout prevention programs. However, these students evidenced relatively low levels of participation in “special education programs for the educationally or physically handicapped” (between 2.0 and 11.2 percent). In addition, students identified by teachers as disabled participated in extracurricular activities to a lesser extent than nondisabled students.

Students who identified themselves as disabled reported higher levels of participation in remedial English and mathematics programs than did their nondisabled counterparts (32.1 percent versus 18.7 percent and 42.9 percent versus 20.3 percent, respectively). These students also reported that they and their parents participated in school-related activities as frequently as parent-identified disabled students.

Educational Outcomes of Students with Disabilities

• Students identified by teachers and parents as disabled in NELS:88 earned lower high school grades in core courses, scored lower on mathematics and reading proficiency tests, and were more likely to drop out of school than their nondisabled counterparts. In addition, these students reported lower educational expectations, for themselves and for them by their parents, and were less prepared for higher education than their nondisabled counterparts by virtue of not having taken the ACT or the SAT.

Among the different disability categories, students identified by their parents as having emotional problems recorded the lowest grades and the highest levels of school dropout. Teacher- and parent-identified students with multiple disabilities and learning disabilities recorded the lowest mathematics and reading proficiency levels.

Self-identified students with disabilities reported comparable grades to nondisabled students with the exception of English, but reported higher dropout rates and lower mathematics and reading proficiency levels.

General Observations

• Students identified in NELS:88 as disabled tended to have greater difficulties in school and realized fewer of the positive outcomes of schooling. These students were more often retained in grade, enrolled in remedial classes, and placed in dropout prevention programs. Perhaps as a result, they earned fewer credits in core curriculum areas, had lower educational expectations, and had higher dropout rates than nondisabled students on average. The severity of these sorts of education-related problems for disabled students did appear to vary by type of disabling condition. For example, students with emotional problems were shown to have among the highest dropout rates, while students with health problems compared most favorably with nondisabled students with respect to several types of outcomes. For these reasons, when the school experiences and outcomes of disabled students are examined, it continues to be important to collect information and carry out analyses separately for various specific disability categories.

Relatively small percentages of students with disabilities as identified in NELS:88 perceived themselves or were identified by school officials as having received special education services during high school. The low reported participation rates in “programs for the educationally or physically handicapped” and in special education programs may raise questions concerning the adequacy with which students with special needs are identified and served in our nation’s high schools, and the extent to which these students are being served in more inclusive environments that might affect their awareness of being in a “special” program. It should be noted, however, that not all children with disabilities need special school services; for example, a child with a purely physical disability who receives the proper medical services for that disability may not require special services. In addition, NELS:88 sampling procedures and instrumentation effectively may have removed from consideration many students who would typically receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and may have led to the identification of students at risk of educational failure generally as disabled students.

• Teachers in NELS:88 were perceptive judges of which students were failing to perform well in the classroom, but linking the identification of disability status to classroom performance may blur the distinction between students with disabilities and students at risk. In NELS:88, teachers identified students as disabled only if their condition affected their school work. As a result, students whose disabilities did not affect their work would likely not have been classified by teachers as disabled, and students whose disability status might have been questionable but whose work in school was poor may have been classified by teachers as disabled. Despite this vagueness in disability definitions, teacher reports of student disability status often “overlapped” the reports made by different NELS:88 respondents. And, the students identified by teachers as disabled (in contrast to those identified by parents) also were found to have more of the sorts of personal characteristics, educational experiences, and records of achievement one might associate with students in need of special services (e.g., lower SES, higher participation in dropout prevention programs, lower gains in reading proficiency). In the future, however, it will be important for survey research efforts to separate perceptions of student disability status from their classroom performance.

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