O’Connor, I.M. and Klein, P.D. (2004). Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 34 (2): 115-27.
A number of studies have indicated that reading comprehension can be a challenge with Autistic spectrum disorders. Even high-functioning individuals tend to excel at recognizing and being able to pronounce individual words, often with greater proficiency than neurotypical peers, but have trouble:
However, methods of improving reading comprehension have not been tested very much in past Autism research. This study looks at how successful several methods of support that have been used to improve reading comprehension in other populations might be for higher functioning, autistic adolescents. Twenty teenagers on the Spectrum (six with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome) each read and answered questions about five passages. For two of the passages, they had no assistance, and then for each of the other three passages a different intervention was used to prompt their comprehension. (All five passages were at approximately the same level of difficulty, and the passages used as controls for some participants were used as variables for others, and vice versa.)
Of the three methods, the only one that seemed to lead to statistically significant improvement was anaphoric cuing. This intervention involved prompting students to stop reading when they came across pronouns and consciously determine which proper noun the pronoun represented. The other two methods were pre-reading questions and cloze. In the cloze method, words were deliberately omitted throughout the passage and students were instructed to pause (and re-read if necessary) when they reached the blank spaces to determine what the missing words should be. With pre-reading questioning, before the students began reading, they were asked questions related to the topic of the passage that they were expected to know generally, to get them thinking about the subject matter. Both cloze and pre-reading questions corresponded with minor and statistically insignificant (meaning they were small enough to be accounted for by the margin of error of the study) improvements in reading comprehension. In several cases, the pre-reading questions actually generated responses having to do with the participant’s perseverative interests, and once they were on this topic they apparently remained distracted while reading the passage.
This article would be most useful for educators working with children on the Autistic spectrum. Parents might also benefit from this information when meeting with teachers and school officials about their child’s Individualized Education Plan and so forth. In many regards, the research methods seem to be quite thorough, and the study does make the case that anaphoric cuing might be worth trying with students with Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism. The research is preliminary, however, and the sample was very small (and definitely not representative – only one female student was included, for instance). The authors themselves call for further research to determine if success with anaphoric cuing might lead to students eventually becoming conditioned to analyze pronouns without prompting, as well as whether the pre-reading questioning and cloze techniques can be modified to be more helpful for those with developmental disorders.
- John Cavanagh
Asperger Foundation International
501 Madison Avenue,
18th Floor
New York, NY 10022
Phone:
212-371-7755
www.aspfi.org