Autism, 3.02 (V) What are the Strengths and Weaknesses...?

» In this lesson, we will discuss common patterns of strength and weakness seen in people on the autism spectrum. And how they manifest across different learning domains, including reading, writing and math. You will also hear a segment from Dr. Peter Mundy, Professor of Learning and Mind Sciences and the Director of Educational Programs at the UC Davis Mind Institute. As he describes some of the findings from a research study on learning in autism that's taking place at UC Davis. As indicated in previous lessons, autism is a spectrum disorder. Meaning that there is wide variability of symptom expression and wide variability of functioning and support required by individuals across the spectrum. While there is this wide variability seen across the autism spectrum, we do tend to see specific patterns of strength and weakness associated with this disability. Some of the characteristic strengths of individuals on the autism spectrum include their ability to memorize and recall different facts and information. Their ability to follow concrete rules and procedures and their ability to make use of different visual learning and visual information. There are also typical patterns of weakness across the autism spectrum. We see weaknesses in flexibility and the ability to organize, manage time and in the ability to work within groups and other situations that require social communication. We also commonly see weaknesses in auditory processing and the ability to make use of verbal information. There are also challenges in the ability to generalize skills learned in one context into different or novel contexts and situations. These patterns of strength and weakness demonstrate themselves across the different academic domains. For example, in the area of reading, we often see strengths in phonics and decoding as well as site reading, because these require qualifications of letters, sounds and specific words. But we see weaknesses in reading comprehension, synthesis and being able to recall the most relevant information from a passage. The patterns of strength can often mask the weaknesses. For example, child may be a very fluent reader and have a high vocabulary and this may mask the deficits that they have in reading comprehension. It's important when we're assessing the academic needs of a child with autism that we look very closely at reading comprehension and pay attention to difficulties that the child may have in answering why and how questions. The patterns of strength and weakness can also be seen in the academic domain of writing. Often, children with autism will show strengths in grammar, punctuation and spelling as these are skills that a child could easily memorize the rules and procedures for doing. The patterns of weakness are often associated with the legibility of the writing, as well as the organization of ideas. Patterns of strength and weakness can also be seen in the area of mathematics. Often, children with autism are very good at calculation and memorizing math facts but they may show weaknesses in the area of concepts and the real world application of math. In the following segment, you will hear an excerpt from a lecture given from Dr. Peter Mundy. Dr. Mundy is the director of Educational Research at the UC Davis Mind Institute, he Lisa Kapp endowed chair in Neurodevelopment and Education and a professor in the school of education and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. In 2009, the National Institute of Mental Health granted Dr. Mundy funding to develop a collaborative multidisciplinary social attention virtual reality lab for researchers on social attention, learning and academic development in school age children with autism. In 2012, the Institute for Education Science provided four years of funding to allow his research group the opportunity to conduct a longitudinal study of the factors that impair or facilitate school based learning in elementary and secondary students with autism. In this lecture, Dr. Mundy will describe some of the initial findings from this study related to reading, writing and math. » Nancy, [LAUGH] when I wrote the grant, and I was ready to go and Nancy joined the labs about six months before we started or something like that and so I wanted to measure reading with a WIAT. It's just two measures, really, basically and I thought, wow, that's great, standardized. Everybody else is using that. And Nancy said, well, I don't think that's adequate, because we wouldn't know anything about decoding, really not enough. We wouldn't really know about reading comprehension, because the way the WIAT measures reading comprehension is inadequate. So I said, okay, we'll you tell me and so this is Nancy's battery and it's the most comprehensive battery. I think that's ever been presented to children with autism in school to measure reading development. It really gets it a number of different dimensions, all I've just putting this up to say, it's a really comprehensive look and it allows us to do a lot of kinda nuanced things. One of the main findings so far is when we look at younger children. So we have elementary school children eight to 11 and then we have basically, secondary students 12 to 16. When we look at the younger children with autism, we see there are about 1 in 1.6, 1.4 grade level behind in reading comprehension, that's significant. The children with ADHD less so. There's a big difference here in the reading development in elementary school and the typical kids are just about at average. If we then go forward to these older children, my goodness, they're further behind. So we were just talking about the idea of deceleration before I began the talk, I was talking about the notion of deceleration in development. Oftentimes with these children with autism, they don't keep up. It's not like they're losing skills. It's just that the other groups are going ahead faster and that's what looks like what's happening in terms of reading comprehension here. They're not keeping up here and then they fall even further behind here by secondary school. Kids with ADHD show the same effect, but not nearly as robust or strong in effect. And the kids part of the reason these kids look like their falling behind more is that kids in secondary school go accelerate froward at least many of them do, but that's a significant issue then. So we've identified a learning area. One learning area for high functioning children with autism is in reading comprehension about I'd say, five to seven other papers were available before we had these data that was strongly suggestive of this, but they didn't quite capture it like this. They didn't capture the age differences so clearly. The sample size weren't so large, they didn't control for ADHD. So this is kind of the definitive data right now saying, yeah, this is a real issue for higher functioning children, some higher functioning children. We can look at fluency too, how well can children read out loud? How rapidly without making errors? We didn't see too much of an impact of ADHD on reading within the autism sample. It didn't matter if they were high or low in ADHD in terms of how they were doing in reading, which was a surprise to us. It does matter a little bit in terms of fluency in that they're a little bit lower, see Gort fluency here. They're a little bit lower if they have the symptoms of ADHD, then other children with autism and a little bit lower than the other samples as well. So the one thing that marks this group in terms of reading or stands out is that when their trying to say things out loud, that's a struggle for them when their reading. So reading, there are many, many things children have to do with regard to reading and we can't get to them all in one study. We can look at a few things, like reasoning and this is an illustration that Nancy found that I think is really compelling. I mean, this is what reading's like. It's all these different strands that have to intertwine perfectly together in order for you to have a strong rope or a strong capacity for reading comprehension. And if any of those strands are weak, you'll have some weakness in reading comprehension. And the more strands that are weak, the more weakness you'll have. So we can look at one of these strands right now. Verbal reasoning, the ability to make references, cuz you have to infer things when you're reading or listening to language. And one of the measures that Nancy put in is a curriculum based measure called a QRI, which measures reading comprehension, but it does it in a different way than the Gort does and it does a couple things. It uses explicit questions. Do you know the facts? Didn't I put an example? Yeah, the boys were walking home with shopping bags full of food. Where were the boys walking? They were walking home, that's a fact versus an implicit message, where were the boys walking from? They were carrying shopping bags. You wouldn't say, they were walking from shopping bags. » [LAUGH] » Well, you could. But you would probably say, they were walking from the store or you could say they were walking from shopping, which is almost there, but you have to make an inference. So that's the difference and you can see that, so we've got the high functioning autism, high functioning with ADHD. Here they're not doing too badly. They are lower, but they're not as far off with the explicit as one might think. And the great thing is this is tested without the child being able to see the text that they were just reading and then we give them the text they can look back at the text and we see if it improves their response and everybody improves, so it's malleable. This problem that they're having with reading is one in terms of keeping it as a representation and accessing it. But if we give them the information, they can see it. It's not a problem with picking it out of the text, so that gives up hope and entry into how we might begin to intervene. When we come over here to the implicit, that's where the problem really is. They're much lower on implicit. Even here though they improve, but they stay much lower on implicit, because that's a core cognitive issue for kids with Autism. Making inferences, we don't understand why is a little more difficult for them. In order to continue with this kind of research and I think it's very, very important, we have to be very very sophisticated in how we try to interpret the information. And so, one of the things that Nancy has done is gone way beyond my sophistication in terms of the data analysis. And so what we can now interpret all of the kinds of measures that we're using to see exactly what's driving the reading comprehension problems of the kids with ASD. And basically, I'm presenting you this, so you can see that it's hard to tell you everything, because it's really complex information. But what we really know is that these types of language measures where we're looking at higher level language processes, really are driving this relationship to some degree. And particularly, when we look at the connection between symptoms, autism symptoms and the problem. We see that the symptoms, surprisingly are related to reading accuracy. I think we understand that, that's not that important or not that informative. But the symptoms of autisms are related to language, which then I related to reading comprehension, seems obvious. But for the most part in our field when kids get to their high functioning and they're in regular education, we don't think they have a language problem. We don't intervene with a language problem. We say, they're doing so much better than the minimally verbal children that that's no longer an issue. But it is an issue, because it's directly connected to reading and learning from reading. So we have to understand this much better and we probably are gonna have to figure out ways to identify children who need the extra intervention on language development in order to get to better reading comprehension. One of the things that we can see and you don't, this is a scatter plot and the thing to really pay attention to here is this line. And this line tells us that in terms of high functioning children with autism that there's a relationship between their reading abilities and how well they do on math problems solving, word problems. If you're not reading very well, you're gonna get to a point in other areas of learning in school that their reading is gonna start to impact and negatively impact your ability to learn. And this is just evidence that reading and our sample is related to their ability to solve Word problems, math word problems, which is a big, big issue. You've gotta be able to read to be able to do some aspects of math and we have also started to look at writing in students. This is a really tough area. I mean, this is really hard. How many teachers or educators are there here? So what do you think about the writing development of students who have autism? I see wide eyes, like, oh, let's not talk about that. So if when we ask parents, what are the problems higher functioning children are having? They say, reading and writing. And they say, math too, but reading and writing always. And so we've really gotta put our minds to understanding what's going on there, we've started to look at the writing. Measurement of writing is much harder than measurement of reading or math. What we've done so far is just begun to understand that working memory really, seems to be something that's very is a big component of the ability to write and looks like it might be driving some of the issues for children with autism. In fact, when we look at it more closely. Basically, that when we look at children with autism age, symbolic working memory and story memory affect writing. Whereas for the ADHD samples, storing memory, but it's not symbolic working memory and then in the TD sample neither working memory or age were related to writing. So we can begin to tease out the things that are related to the writing problems and we hope that in the future that's really gonna direct us to. What do we need to do for this group of kids? What do we need to do for that group of kids, et cetera. But the writing is going to take us longer than anything, because the measurement issues Matt Zajack from University of Santa Barbara. He's a graduate student, he's very clever. He's tireless, he's working all the time on it. And the progress is very good, but very slow in developing really accurate writing measures.