Chronic illness and academic growth: Modeling individual differences in progress with covariance structure analysis

This study examines differential progress in academic achievement over the course of the elementary and high school career for a nationally-representative sample of children with asthma or a seizure disorder, and a comparison group of healthy peers. It addresses these questions: (1) does health status (presence or absence of chronic illness) influence yearly rates of change in reading and mathematics achievement between 7 and 16 years? (2) is the effect of health status on academic growth mediated by constitutional factors such as intelligence and positive dispositional qualities that are adaptive in school contexts?;Prior cross-sectional research indicates that chronically-ill children achieve at lower levels than healthy controls. This thesis shifts the focus from comparisons of status to comparisons of change in achievement over time and explores whether ill children make differential gains relative to the healthy population. This study adopts the individual growth curve approach to the analysis of change and introduces covariance structure analysis as a new estimation strategy for fitting the between-child statistical models.;The longitudinal sample is drawn from a large-scale British birth cohort study that charts the progress of all children born during one week in 1958. Achievement scores in reading and mathematics for 437 asthmatic, 72 epileptic, and 514 healthy children were obtained from standardized tests given at ages 7, 11, and 16. The predictors were derived from standardized measures of general intelligence and parental ratings of disposition that included the dimensions of persistence, adaptability, sociability, and emotionality.;The findings suggest that asthmatic and epileptic children are not at educational risk by virtue of their health status alone. In both content domains an illness condition does not have deleterious effects on progress; to the contrary, asthmatics display faster progress relative to other children when gender, socioeconomic status, intelligence, and disposition are controlled. The growth curves of children with seizures are similar to healthy children, in both domains.;Lack of any interaction between health status and either intelligence and disposition suggests that these constitutional variables mediate risk of failure in the same way for all children. Dispositional qualities appear to play a more powerful role in sustaining progress than does intelligence.