Explainer: Challenges in Reading for Autistic Students
At the Life Span Institute, the Comprehension and Language Learning (CALL) Lab is focused on understanding how people with developmental disabilities, especially autism, process spoken and written language with the goal to improve learning and job opportunities for these individuals. The lab is conducting a research project on understanding comprehension among autistic readers.
Meghan M. Davidson, director of the CALL Lab, explained reading and literacy needs in autistic students, including challenges and opportunities for support.
Why do autistic students struggle with reading?
Autism spectrum disorder includes individuals with varying support needs, communicative abilities, and intelligence levels. However, autistic individuals of varying support levels and abilities face similar challenges in reading comprehension.
While reading problems in non-autistic students tend to be related to decoding words, autistic students struggle less with identifying the words they’ve read and more understanding what they have read, or reading comprehension.
“I hear this anecdotally from parents,” Davidson explained, “Like, ‘My child is struggling with reading, but he comes home and reads the encyclopedia just fine.’ So, what are we missing? That’s what we’re trying to sort out.”
The missing part: what’s in the text
Reading comprehension involves things like an individual’s ability to inference, their language ability (such as vocabulary or the words a reader knows), and their ability to monitor their understanding as they read (known as comprehension monitoring).
“But this actually ignores a pretty large piece that goes into comprehension,” Davidson said. That is, if students don’t understand the concepts within the text, comprehension is impaired.
Davidson used the analogy of a sports fan reading about baseball.
“If you know a lot about baseball, and you read something about baseball, you're actually going to understand more from that text than if you don't know anything about baseball,” she explained. “That's because there's information in the text that is specific to that text.” However, she continued, if that same person who knew all about baseball went on to read about a subject that they knew little to nothing about, “That's going to impact your comprehension.”
Social understanding inhibits reading success
Building on the baseball analogy, if autistic readers have difficulty understanding non-social interactions in the real world, they are going to experience the same difficulties when reading about social interaction. Understanding social factors in reading is a newer area of literacy researchers are working to understand.
With eight participants aged 9- to 12-years-old, a small pilot study at KU's CALL Lab determined it was more challenging for autistic individuals to answer questions about social information after reading a text with highly social information.
These are the types of questions students tend to be asked in schools, but students with autism don't have skills needed to help them produce the answers. This puts autistic students at a disadvantage.
Researchers are working to determine what these tools are to help improve autistic children’s literacy in this area.