Explainer: Challenges in reading for autistic students

Autistic students often face unique challenges with reading comprehension, even when they can easily decode words, according to Meghan M. Davidson, director of the CALL Lab at the University of Kansas. 

While non-autistic students typically struggle with sounding out or recognizing words, autistic students are more likely to have difficulty understanding the meaning of what they read. Davidson and her team study the reading and literacy needs of autistic learners to uncover what supports can help.

“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.