Review: Teaching Children with Autism to Read for Meaning

This literature review by Randi, Newman and Grigorenko (2010) is an overview of the current research on comprehension and autism, from the cognitive skills engaged and the deficits in students with ASD, to the reading comprehension interventions being used.

Three sources of comprehension problems identified by Randi et al. (2010) are "(1) sensitivity to story structure, (2) inference making, and (3) comprehension-monitoring" (p. 4). Students with ASD can comprehend well at word-level and at sentence-level, but have difficulty comprehending at text-level (connecting the sentences together to understand the text as a whole). It makes sense to conclude that understanding and being sensitive to story structure would be difficult if it's difficult to connect comprehension of individual sentences. Story structure is something that can be directly and explicitly taught and research suggests that "children with ASD may benefit from direct instruction in literary devices" (p. 9). There are lots of great graphic organizers around to use to analyze story structure and I have often used Storyboard That for students to show me their understanding of beginning, middle, end, or rising action, climax, and falling action.

Inference making is the particularly challenging piece for students with ASD because they have a deficit in theory of mind. They have a difficult time putting themselves in the place of characters. As a result, it's hard to read between the lines in a story by imagining characters motivations, thoughts, and beliefs. Research found that students with ASD tended to "identify characters' emotions without giving causal explanation" (p.9), likely because they relied on the pictures in the books to tell them how the characters were feeling. Randi et al. (2010) say that interventions which prompt students to focus attention on possible causes of characters' emotions and direct instruction on emotions will support narrative understanding. Learning about social situations will be an important part of their reading comprehension instruction. In the context of this course, we got to see some VR with Merge Cube and VR videos which display emotions and emotional behaviour and which I feel would be highly useful for students with ASD to identify emotions by body language. As text becomes more complex, authors often describe characters' body language, rather than explicitly tell the reader how they are feeling, so it is important to develop understanding of emotional signals to infer emotional states.

Asking a student with ASD to explain someone's else's emotions or predict their behaviour can feel like asking them to read their mind-- impossible! (Until we learn to infer that is!)

Comprehension monitoring is the ability to check for comprehension and know if you're understanding a text while reading it. This can be challenging if you understand on a sentence-level because you may not realize that you're not really understanding the text as a whole. I wonder if explicit instruction in linking sentences would help create the necessity of checking comprehension of a whole text. A sample task might be looking at one sentence and then choosing from a couple of different options which sentence might logically come next. That would make a cool iPad app! :) This kind of task could help a student learn that sentences in a story need to be connected and that understanding the relationship between them is essential for comprehension. Developing their self-awareness to pause and think "I don't understand what's going on in this story" while reading is so important and knowing that sentences and paragraphs and chapters need to be connected is key.

Students with ASD benefit from explicit instruction, authentic materials and settings, rewards, parent-supported and computer-enhanced instruction (Randi et. al, 2010, p.12). Don't we all? Teaching this way sounds pretty UDL to me! I think explicit instruction in comprehension can no longer be neglected and we can't deny the importance of social-emotional learning for so many reasons, but reading comprehension is a very clear and more 'academic' benefit to all students. Students with ASD may need it more than others, but everyone will benefit!