Persistence and academic performance in higher education: a comparison between students with and without reported learning disabilities

The few existing studies in international literature about students with learning disabilities’ postsecondary persistence and academic performances show varied outcomes. Rigorous research has been limited. Moreover, in Italy there is a dearth of public data on students’ careers and clearly a deficiency regarding literature on this topic. To tackle this situation, propensity score matching techniques were used in this paper to compare data about persistence and academic success of students who reported a learning disability with those who did not, all enrolled in a large University in Northern Italy. Once potential confounders were taken into account, our findings indicated that students with an attested learning disability were as likely to persist in academic context as peers without any LD. However, for what concerns academic performances, the outcomes varied according to the measures being used. Although there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of the number of course credits (ECTS) earned, students with learning disabilities continued to lag behind their counterparts without disabilities concerning first-year grade point average achieved. This paper includes final recommendations for future research, in order to fill existing gaps in methodology and area of study.