The Academic Success of College Students with ADHD: The First Year

Abstract

College students with ADHD commonly share strengths, such as creativity, high energy levels, and resilience, which are advantageous in their future careers. Yet, they often encounter barriers or obstacles in college in their classroom, curricular, and out-of-class experiences and less academic success, such as lower grades and rates of persistence, than their collegiate peers without ADHD. Quantitative studies of the academic success of students with ADHD have not broadly incorporated students’ college experiences to understand the role of these experiences on their academic success. This dissertation aims to investigate the role of college experiences on the academic success of students with ADHD to identify targeted aspects of the college environment for change. I ask two research questions.

RQ1. What relationships exist between students’ precollege characteristics and experiences, the college experience, and academic success for students with ADHD?

RQ2. What college experiences, if any, mediate the relationship between a pre-college ADHD diagnosis and academic success?

I use Terenzini and Reason’s college impact model. It posits that students’ pre-college characteristics and experiences and individual student experiences in college (classroom, curricular, and out-of-class) influence their academic success. I conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) of students’ academic success in their first year and considered two measures of academic success, first-year grades and creativity. The former provides a traditional measure of academic success, and the latter is a known, yet often undervalued in engineering education, strength common to many students with ADHD. To estimate these SEMs, I used multi-institutional, longitudinal data (n = 43,523, including 2,082 students indicating they had an ADHD diagnosis) from the Higher Education Research Institute from undergraduate students at four-year higher education institutions in the U.S. The data set has matched responses from students as incoming college students and near the end of their first year.

The first-year grades SEMs indicated that students with ADHD had more difficulty, on average, adjusting to college academics (measured as understanding their professors’ expectations, time management skills, and study skills) than their peers without ADHD. They also earned, on average, slightly lower grades (one-fifth of a grade change or approximately 0.1 standard deviation) than their peers without ADHD. Students’ academic adjustment (i.e., the ease with which they adjusted to college academics) partially mediated (approximately 33%) the relationship between an ADHD diagnosis and lower first-year grades. Students’ interaction with faculty and their sense of belonging had a negligible mediating effect on the ADHD-first-year grades relationship.

For creativity, students with ADHD were more likely to identify as having high levels of creativity (above average or in the top 10% of their peers) than their peers without ADHD. The first-year college experience, measured as their interaction with faculty and sense of belonging, had little effect on their self-rating of their creativity among students with ADHD.

These findings are broadly applicable to higher education administrators, staff, and instructors and can be used to inform higher education instructional practices and institutional policies. They are particularly important within engineering education and, more broadly, science, engineering, and mathematics education because students with ADHD may choose not to enter these fields or decide not to persist in these majors if they earn lower grades and their strengths are not valued. Based on my findings, I recommend instructional practices that scaffold students’ academic adjustment while deemphasizing its role in first-year grades.