Performance of Learning Disabled and Low Achieving Secondary Students on Formal Features of a Paragraph-Writing Task

An experimental paragraph-writing task was administered to 26 learning disabled and 26 low achieving students in grades 7 through 10. Writing samples were analyzed for syntactic maturity, productivity and word selection; for conventions such as tense and number markers and number agreement; and for spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Only spelling performance proved significantly different in favor of low achievers. Other formal features previously found to distinguish underachieving learning disabled students from achieving peers failed to discriminate learning disabled students from non-learning disabled students with average intelligence and low achievement.