Teaching Students with Autism

According to the National Autistic Society, the leading organization in the United Kingdom for people with autism and their families, the condition "is a lifelong disability that affects the way a person communicates and relates to people around them." Children on the autistic spectrum face challenges in relating to others and they find forming friendships extremely difficult as they ...

According to the National Autistic Society, the leading organization in the United Kingdom for people with autism and their families, the condition "is a lifelong disability that affects the way a person communicates and relates to people around them." Children on the autistic spectrum face challenges in relating to others and they find forming friendships extremely difficult as they have problems in understanding other people's emotions. They experience problems with social interaction and communication, leading to difficulties at school for the child, other children and their teachers.

All children learn as they grow and children with autistic spectrum disorders are no different. Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning that it manifests itself differently in each child. Like a row of dominoes, if an early aspect of development is affected in a particular case of autism, other later-emerging aspects of development will be affected too. As a result, each case of autism presents a slightly different profile of learning abilities and learning disabilities. Each learning ability and each learning disability may influence how a particular child with autism may or may not learn something the way other children without autism may learn that same thing.

According to the Autism Society, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention autism report of 2009, the prevalence of autism has risen to 1 in every 110 births in the United States and almost 1 in 70 boys. This created a major debate in the media but the Autism Society said it wasn't a surprising announcement as its figures showed there were 1.5 million Americans who are classed as being on the autism spectrum disorder. The National Autistic Society, states that due to an increased awareness and understanding of autism in the UK, more children are being diagnosed at an early age.

The conceptualization of learning weaknesses and strengths is core to the whole field of learning disabilities and to compensatory educational approaches. For this reason, autism could be seen as a learning disability syndrome, with each symptom connoting a related cluster of learning weakness or an area of a so called autism-specific learning disability. Using autistic learning disabilities as the organizing construct, it is possible to reconceptualize treatment for autism. The first step is to assess a child's autistic learning disabilities. The second step is to examine existing treatment strategies and treatment programs and systematically ask what each has to offer in the way of compensation with respect to a specific autistic learning disability. The third step is to put the first two processes together, taking the list of treatments that may be relevant to a particular child's specific profile of autistic learning disabilities and then figuring out how, within this child's matrix of abilities and disabilities, to select treatment components that will address each weakness using strategies that utilize the child's relative strengths. In this way, a specific set of treatment needs can be formulated and an individualized treatment plan developed.

There has been major progress in how children with autism are treated. A number of methods for teaching children with autism have been devised, tested and used successfully. However, parents and teachers often become mired in controversy about what should be done, although there is no right answer to this question. Every child is educationally and biologically unique and will need something slightly different to meet their needs. The challenge is to understand the range of differences that make up what are called the autistic spectrum disorders and then to understand the individual differences that can be described in terms of slightly different profiles of strengths and weaknesses. The design of truly individual treatment plans that exploit strengths and compensate for weaknesses begins with a detailed understanding of how learning is different for children with autism than for those without autism and how learning is different among different children with autism.

According to Fox News (March 8, 2011), a new robot is helping to teach children on the autistic spectrum at a pre-school in Stevenage in Hertfordshire, England. The robot, called Kaspar, is showing the children at the nursery how to learn to play and teaching them about emotions during weekly sessions. Similar projects exist in the US, Canada and Japan although researchers report that the UK project is the most advanced. The project is the idea of scientists at the University of Hertfordshire, who have been taking Kaspar to the nursery for the sessions