Integration Factors Related to the Academic Success and Intent to Persist of College Students with Learning Disabilities

Despite increased enrollment, outcomes such as grade point average (GPA), persistence, and graduation rates for college students with learning disabilities (LD) continue to lag behind those of their nondisabled peers. Reasons for the differences vary but may include academic and social integration, factors identified as important to the success of college students in general. This research investigated the relative influence of background characteristics, precollege achievement, and college integration variables on the academic success and intent to persist of college freshmen and sophomores with LD. While academic and social integration were not unique predictors of college GPA, both integration variables were unique predictors of intent to persist. The findings suggest that beyond high school achievement and background characteristics, college experiences as captured by academic and social integration are promising constructs to help explain the persistence of college students with LD. Implications for future research and practices for high school and college personnel are discussed.     

A method for transcribing signed and spoken language

Transcribing sign communication used simultaneously with spoken English presents investigators with a unique problem: the singular quality of the bimodal communicative interactions cannot be accurately depicted using accepted conventions for recording either spoken or signed language samples. This article proposes guidelines for transcribing such data. The need for guidelines arose during an earlier study of the language development of a hearing child of deaf parents. To meet the immediate needs of that study, rules and conventions from previous studies were combined with newly generated ones, resulting in the guidelines proposed in this article. The guidelines can be applied to data in which intermodal linguistic influence is suspected.     

Steps Toward More Effective Implementation of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

The goal of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is to improve testing practices, but their impact on practice appears spotty. Self-regulation clearly fails in some instances. The establishment of an external agency to oversee testing practices and adherence to the Standards would face substantial hurdles, and the ambiguity of many of the Standards would hobble such an organization if one were created. Many of the Standards are general statements of principle, and past controversies make clear that we in the field often disagree about the reasons for them, their applicability to specific cases, and their practical meaning in specific contexts. This paper argues that the field should follow two approaches to lessen this ambiguity. First, using journals, conferences, and other vehicles, we should foster more frequent and more protracted debate about the practical meaning of key Standards, such as 13.6 and 13.7, which mandate that a decision that will have a "major impact" on a student should not be based on a single score. Second, future revisions of the Standards should use concrete examples of testing practices to clarify the meaning of the Standards, much as the legal system uses case law to clarify the meaning of the general principles embodied in statutes .