Literacy Interventions for Students with Autism
I have learned that the learning to read journey of students with autism can be more differentiated and fragmented than other students. The article included many important insights about teaching reading comprehension to students whose abilities may be varied and cyclical, as is often the case with students with autism. The authors give a series of detailed teaching strategies for improving reading comprehension for students with autism, including assessment of comprehension through a tool like DIBELS, cooperative learning opportunities, explicit instruction, positive reinforcement, perspective taking, self-regulation, visual supports such as graphic organizers, and explicitly and systematically teaching text structures and signal words. Overall, good reading instruction will generally be the same, but tweaks can be made according to the specific challenges of the student, as every student with autism will have unique needs and abilities.
I think that explicit instruction makes a lot of sense for literal thinkers, which can correlate with autism. I find teachers’ frequent emphasis on perspective taking slightly troubling. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2020) hypothesizes that the nonstop narrative that autistic people are bad at communication is actually not true, and that autistic people understand other autistic perfectly fine. They just don’t understand neurotypical people easily, but neurotypical people also do not understand autistic people well. Communication challenges are thus a two-way street. This can be applied to perspective taking, too, and has been studied academically by Heasman and Gillespie, who find that autistic people’s family members tend to attribute a lack of perspective taking to autistic people, but also tend not to consider the perspective of autistic family members (2017). Are we applying similar prejudices here?
I wonder if the tendency of autistic students to focus on small details is truly that problematic. In graduate university work, my ability to narrow in on certain specific ideas in texts was very beneficial. I have always tended to worry about details, and I wonder if this is truly problematic, or can also be a good thing, depending on the perspective.
I dislike the idea of positive reinforcement using prizes or stickers, because this always feels to me like treating a student like a dog and it just rubs me the wrong way.
I wonder if simply explaining the reasons for doing certain activities or for teaching students things in certain ways would help autistic students, too, since they so often need to have the why be both at the forefront and very clear.
References
Milton, D. (2020). Autism and the double empathy problem. Autism Network Scotland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWUsnT1c_5I
Chang, Y., Menzies, H. M., & Osipova, A. (2020). Reading comprehension instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder. The Reading Teacher 74.3: pp. 255-264.
Heasman, B. & Gillespie, A. (2017). Perspective-taking is two-sided: Misunderstandings between people with Asperger’s syndrome and their family members. Autism 22.6. https://doi.org/10.1177/136236131770