What is it? Self-advocacy is the ability to speak up for yourself. It relates to an individual’s ability to manage their own environment effectively. Promoting self-advocacy involves supporting students to navigate and negotiate their learning.

Evidence? There is emerging evidence that promoting self-advocacy is positively linked to improved students outcomes. But more research is needed on how disabled students engage in self-advocacy within specific academic disciplines.

Should HEPs adopt it? Although it appears that promoting self-advocacy may be beneficial for disabled students, we still need more evidence on this topic. Providers should thus seek to embed evaluation into their practice – see the TASO evaluation guidance for more information on how to do this.

Self-advocacy refers to the ability of an individual to manage their environment effectively for themselves. In the HE context, promoting self-advocacy involves supporting students in developing effective dispositions to navigate and negotiate their learning. Self-advocacy includes a wide range of self-regulatory processes such as:

  • Awareness of one’s own needs;
  • Knowledge of what support is available;
  • Knowing how to advocate effectively for appropriate support;
  • Ability to use the learning environment and adapt it to suit one’s needs,
  • Deploying self-regulatory skills to achieve academic success and successful management of self to include wellbeing and positive identity development.

Approaches that are used to promote self-advocacy include:

  • Interventions to promote awareness of students’ strengths and limitations, which help them how to request accommodations, build a sense of purpose and support identity development;
  • Teaching of specific learning strategies;
  • Cognitive behavioural therapy programmes;
  • Interventions to promote self-regulation to address cognitive, metacognitive and emotional skills development;
  • Mentoring models, including peer and academic mentoring.

The advice on this page draws on evidence about the promotion of self-advocacy for disabled HE students. It refers to a wide range of disabled student subgroups who fall under this umbrella. There is not enough evidence to provide specific advice on how to support students with specific disabilities.

Self-advocacy is a dominant theme within the disabled student support literature.

Correlational analysis of data at a US college found self-advocacy to be the strongest predictor of academic performance, when considering a range of variables impacting disabled student performance (Fleming et al., 2017). This may be because self-advocacy is a prerequisite for disabled students accessing most forms of support. However, it may also be because self-advocacy can become a proxy for some other unobserved difference between students which also affects their ability to access accommodations, for instance family support. This is why it is important to test whether approaches to improve self-advocacy also improve related outcomes.

There are a small number of studies which explicitly examine the link between participation in mentoring or coaching programmes and self-advocacy among disabled students. They find some evidence for a positive relationship between mentoring and self-advocacy, and mixed findings in relation to academic performance (Markle et al. 2017; Hillier et al. 2019).

In one example of stronger impact evidence, Marino et al. (2020) explored the impact of coaching for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) students with executive function deficits in a US college. They randomly allocated a sample of 120 students to receive the coaching or to a control group who did not. Participants who received the intervention reported higher scores on cumulative GPA than the control group. In addition, students in the treatment group were more likely to persist in their STEM majors.

Another stronger impact evaluation focused on a cognitive-behavioural mentoring programme involving weekly group and individual sessions delivered over two consecutive terms in a US context. A sample of 250 students with ADHD were randomly allocated to either receive the mentoring straight away or at a later date. The group who received the mentoring showed significant improvement in executive functioning (greater increase in their knowledge of ADHD, greater increase in use of behaviour strategies and significantly increased use of disability accommodations (Anastopoulos et al., 2021). Reporting on the same intervention, Eddy et al. (2021) found no impact on attainment.

A broad range of programmes are used to promote self-advocacy for disabled students, making it difficult to distil general features of effective practice.

There is a high degree of variation in the content and delivery of programmes. Understanding how each design feature affects outcomes for each subgroup of disabled students is an essential step towards more effective programmes.

While the evidence does seem to suggest some positive relationship between self-advocacy and disabled student success, few articles examine how disabled students engage in self-advocacy training, both generally and within specific academic disciplines (Pfeifer et al., 2021).

TASO’s advice on the efficacy of promoting self-advocacy is based on evidence from seven research studies including three causal studies.

The key references are given below.

Key references

Causal studies

Anastopoulos, A. D., Langberg, J. M., Eddy, L. D., Silvia, P. J., & Labban, J. D. (2021). A randomized controlled trial examining CBT for college students with ADHD. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 89(1), 21. Linked here.

Marino, M. T., Vasquez, E., Banerjee, M., Parsons, C. A., Saliba, Y. C., Gallegos, B., & Koch, A. (2020). Coaching as a Means to Enhance Performance and Persistence in Undergraduate STEM Majors With Executive Function Deficits. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 20(5), 94-109. Linked here.

Eddy, L. D., Anastopoulos, A. D., Dvorsky, M. R., Silvia, P. J., Labban, J. D., & Langberg, J. M. (2021). An RCT of a CBT intervention for emerging adults with ADHD attending college: functional outcomes. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 50(6), 844-857. Linked here.

Other studies

Fleming, A. R., Plotner, A. J., & Oertle, K. M. (2017). College Students with Disabilities: The Relationship between Student Characteristics, the Academic Environment, and Performance. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 30(3), 209-221. Linked here.

Markle, L., Wessel, R. D., & Desmond, J. (2017). Faculty Mentorship Program for Students with Disabilities: Academic Success Outcomes (Practice Brief). Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 30(4), 385-392. Linked here.

Hillier, A., Goldstein, J., Tornatore, L., Byrne, E., & Johnson, H. M. (2019). Outcomes of a peer mentoring program for university students with disabilities. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 27(5), 487-508. Linked here.

Pfeifer, M. A., Reiter, E. M., Cordero, J. J., & Stanton, J. D. (2021). Inside and out: factors that support and hinder the self-advocacy of undergraduates with ADHD and/or specific learning disabilities in STEM. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 20(ar17), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-06-0107