Introduction
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological disorder marked by the onset of social interaction and communication impairment at a young age. Although autism is not recognized as a learning disability, autistic children may face some learning difficulties. It affects a person’s social interaction, behavior, communication, and learning ability. For example, many autistic children exhibit an apparent aversion to change, exhibiting repetitive behaviors and interests to feel balanced (Nally et al., 2018; Brady et al.,2021). As a result, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may struggle with additional learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia (Henderson et al., 2014; Davidson & Weismer, 2014; Grindle et al., 2020). These characteristics, such as difficulty reading and comprehending text, can be detrimental to daily life for an autistic kid. From the ages of three to ten, children with ASD are more likely to fall into the lowest performance bracket for phonemic awareness, the foundation skill for good reading.
Understanding the sounds that make up a language is essential for improving reading skills. However, due to limited phonemic awareness, teaching reading skills to children with ASD can be complex. Recent studies show that children with autism from ages seven to ten would be more likely to be in the lowest performance bracket for phonemic awareness (Nally et al., 2018). ASD children, for example, may have difficulty developing and accessing the background knowledge required for effective reading or communication. According to research, creating mental images can help students with ASD focus on visual learning, which is more effective than talking (Grindle et al., 2020). Notably, children on the autism spectrum require simple steps in reading comprehension and the opportunity to develop reading skills to their fullest potential.
Most research on reading abilities and comprehension in children with ASD employs a variety of tests to assess their intelligence. Cognitive theory is used in these reading and comprehension tests. Cognition is a broad term that encompasses mental processes such as thought, judgment, language, and other higher mental functions (Jordan, 2022). As a result, cognitive theory investigates the mental processes involved in learning and comprehension to explain human behavior. It can be used to teach children as young as infants up to adults learning new skills at work. Similarly, teachers can use cognitive theory concepts to produce better results when developing learning and development programs for children. The theory is critical for understanding why some students advance fast while others require more time in specific subjects to support each student’s academic growth.
The paper delves into the researchers’ psychological theories and ethical behaviors as it examines peer-reviewed articles on reading ability development in autistic children.
The publications applied cognitive psychology theory in the following ways: behavioral, psychometric, information-processing, and social contextual. Cognitive psychology theory focuses on the mind’s role in learning, specifically how the learner absorbs information, performs mental operations, and stores it in memory (Jordan, 2022). Another topic covered in this paper is the ethical principles used in the research during participant recruitment, data collection, and analysis.
Hypothesis
Children with ASD from ages 3 to 10 will be more likely to be in the lowest performance bracket for phonemic awareness, the foundation skill for good reading.
Research Problem
Reading is a challenge for many children with ASD because they find it difficult to comprehend text, albeit they can decode words. For instance, ASD kids may have difficulties grasping reading strategies like making predictions or connections, monitoring for meaning, making inferences, activating prior knowledge, asking questions, and summaries. Notably, autistic children may exhibit some developmental differences that can affect their grasp of comprehension in literacy (Grindle et al., 2020). In socialization, shared enjoyment, imitative play, and joined attention are all related to understanding literacy. When a child has a limited range of social experiences, it can narrow their knowledge of a language. These include vocabulary, imagination, and perspective thinking, which are essential for language learning.
Children with ASD often have a narrower range of interest and tend to focus repetitively within one subject area regarding restrictive interest and repetitive behavior. These can limit the general knowledge, breadth of vocabulary, experiences, and concepts, which affect reading comprehension. Communication and language consist of speaking, listening, reading, and learning. Students with ASD often struggle with communication and language (Kaljejevic, 2022). For example, specific areas of difficulty include all language, receptive and expressive vocabulary, recognizing verbal and nonverbal language, auditory processing delays, and literal language interpretation. Delays in language development can affect language comprehension at the word, sentence, and textual levels. It implies children in the spectrum may need explicit teaching of strategies like making predictions or connections, activating prior knowledge, visualizing, make inferences, to become effective as normal kids (Henderson et al., 2014). It is also essential to evaluate the performance of ASD children in reading and compression compared to normally functioning children to identify their needs and review teaching strategies to suit children on the spectrum.
Biological Psychological Concepts Underlying the Research Proposal
Biological Physiological concepts explored in the study are behavior and the relationship between the body and mind based on cognitive models. The cognitive models often linked to high-level thinking in ASD kids include the theory of the mind (ToM), executive functioning, and central coherence. A person with a strong ToM can easily imagine how others feel (Westra & Carruthers, 2017). On the contrary, individuals with weak ToM have difficulty understanding perspectives outside their own. The ability to understand the mindset and intentions of others and read emotions is crucial in understanding stories (Westra & Carruthers, 2017). For instance, an ASD child exhibiting weak ToM may have difficulty with inferences, understanding mental states, prediction, and purpose. It affects their ability to use knowledge from experiences and text cues to infer what is not directly stated. Therefore, Autistic kids may find it challenging to understand the characters’ motivations and predict their behaviors, as well as the author’s intentions to inform or persuade the reader.
Executive functioning is the process of organizing, planning, and monitoring progress when presented with a situation. While reading, the working memory is conditioned to scrutinize the text for meaning and being able to read for a purpose. Working memory is the thinking skill that focuses on memory and action, which is the ability to remember and use relevant information while in the middle of an activity (Serpell & Esposito, 2016). Focus assists in reading compression by helping the reader to attend to various texts required while reading. Studies indicate that struggling readers, especially ASD children, may experience executive functioning difficulties and verbal working memory and focus (Davidson & Weismer, 2014; McIntyre et al., 2018). Some individuals with impaired executive functioning may find difficulty accessing prior knowledge to make text-to-text, and text-to-self connections, summarize texts, monitor for meaning, and understand cause and effect. Further, someone experiencing challenges in this area may find it hard to discuss the text with teachers and peers consistently.
Central coherence theory is the ability to bring multiple details into one whole concept. Someone with a weak coherence theory may have difficulty creating mental images, summarizing text, and accessing and building background knowledge (Rutherford et al., 2020). They may also have trouble with the main idea of the text. For example, a person with weak coherence looking at a forest may only see individual trees. Therefore, accessing each student to determine an individualized instructional plan is important. Assessment is essential for deciding any deficit in their reading sub-skills, independent instructional and frustration levels, and differentiating hidden instructions, as not all students with ASD will have the same strengths and needs.
Literature Review
The studies’ research methods aim to assess word reading, spelling skills, and numerical operations per cognitive psychology theory. Cognitive psychology theory is concerned with the role of the mind in learning, specifically how the learner absorbs information, engages in mental processes, and stores it in memory (Jordan, 2022). For example, the studies applied cognitive psychology theory using the following approaches: behavioral, psychometric, information-processing, and social contextual. The behavioral theory explains how an individual’s behavior changes in response to their surroundings. Psychometrics assesses the quantitative components of intelligence, such as comprehension, reading, and perception. Individual differences in cognition describe the mental processes involved in acquiring and recalling information or problem-solving in the information-processing theory. A social contextual approach to cognitive development is based on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, which focuses on a child’s social, cultural, and historical background.
Parent interviews, cognitive ability, language ability, early reading ability, and parent reports on socialization and early reading ability were all used in the studies. According to the study findings, autistic children’s relative strength in word recognition may mask phonological decoding difficulties, limiting the development of reading comprehension (Henderson et al., 2014; Davidson & Weismer, 2014). According to the findings of some studies, the overall reading levels of children with autism fell within the normal range on a standardized test of early reading skills (Davidson & Weismer, 2014; Henderson et al., 2014; Kljajevic, 2022). Other studies found that ASD children performed worse than their peers in word recognition, oral language, and theory of mind development (McIntyre et al., 2018). The findings show that ASD children’s reading and comprehension are within normal ranges, but phonological decoding difficulties can limit their reading comprehension.
Most autistic children have reading profiles that show higher decoding skills but lower reading comprehension. Davidson and Weismer (2014) looked at concurrent and longitudinal factors of early reading to see if the profile was visible in autistic children. The authors discovered that 62% of the children in the sample size had a higher alphabet but lower meaning comprehension (Davidson & Weismer, 2014). Despite accurate decoding skills, most research indicates that autistic children struggle with reading comprehension. Other studies have found that many children on the autism spectrum have a significant gap between their reading comprehension and word reading accuracy (Henderson et al., 2014; Grindle et al., 2020; Kljajevic, 2022). These findings emphasize the importance of early language abilities in autistic children as a foundation for reading.
When children with autism start school, they are interested in letters and print but struggle with reading. According to Bullen et al. (2022), when children with autism enter preparation school, 33 to 65 percent exhibit early signs of reading and comprehension difficulties. Even when autistic children have normal cognitive abilities and are verbally capable, only a small percentage (25-30%) remain minimally verbal, speaking only a few words by age 5. (Brady et al., 2021; Kljajevic, 2022). Reading assessment, including early emergent reading-related skills, assists researchers in understanding each child’s strengths and needs. According to Davidson and Weismer (2014), children with poor language abilities have poor reading outcomes later in life, and deficits begin early in the emergent literacy period. High-quality assessment can help identify areas for improvement and track progress after interventions.
Literacy performance requires letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and story comprehension. Vocabulary, letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, and story comprehension appear to be strong predictors of later literacy performance in all children, including those on the autism spectrum, according to research (Brady et al., 2021; Nally et al., 2018; McIntyre et al., 2018). According to McIntyre et al. (2018), structural language components such as phonology, syntax, semantics, and morphology strongly correlate with reading comprehension. As a result, assessing the child’s letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and story comprehension is critical.
A growing body of research suggests that children with autism may struggle with reading and learning. However, the evidence for their deficits in various reading skills is contradictory, and little is known about how reading abilities distinguish autistic children from typical children (Bullen et al., 2022). The current studies conducted a systematic review of the research on reading progression in children with autism. Most studies found that autistic children had higher word levels than nonverbal children. Print awareness, oral language skills, and conventions are all examples of emergent reading behaviors, according to Nally et al. (2018). Understanding the sounds that comprise a language is critical for word deciphering and blending. Other children demonstrated accurate reading but poor comprehension, consistent with a hyperlexia reading profile. These studies add to the scant empirical literature on early reading abilities in autistic children.
Importance of the Research to Biological Psychology
Biological psychology focuses on the relationship between biological makeup and behaviors and experiences. It is responsible for discovering that the nervous system’s structure, including human brains, and the actions of chemicals have a bigger effect on behavior (Garrett & Hough, 2021). The research focuses on assessment tests, which provide an objective way, to measure the brain functioning of ASD children. It offers a practical application as it may be used to evaluate and improve instructional material for people with neurological disorders, like ASD children. Behavior measurement often asserts ecological validity using a scientific approach to testing behavior learning conditions. The study evaluates students’ performance in class using various assessment tests typical of how students normally learn.
The research is essential for reevaluating literacy instructions and making them balanced, explicit, and systematic for ASD. It includes analyzing the common reading ingredients, such as phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, fluency, comprehension strategies, and phonics (Nally et al., 2018). Making literacy balanced entails considering the age and abilities of children taught when selecting techniques and methods. The research helps add to the knowledge of ASD children by improving their understanding of strategies good readers use, the challenges faced by ASD students, and practices applied to assist them in becoming better readers. Assessment is vital in defining the ASD students’ specific reading levels and strengths, and needs. From the research, teachers can tailor their instructions and focus on using recommended practices in teaching literacy along with specific activities to help meet the challenges ASD learners may face concerning the cognitive models (ToM), executive functioning, and central coherence. This research aims to share lessons learned in comprehension to help students with ASD comprehend text deeper to expand their opportunities in education and the world around them.
Research Method
The proposed analysis will use a multiple case study as the research method. A case study method is used to generate a comprehensive, multifaceted understanding of a complex issue in its real-world context (Garrett & Hough, 2021). A researcher can compare the findings of different case studies in multiple case studies. The rationale for using a case study is its ability to integrate qualitative and quantitative information from a variety of sources. Research about progression of reading ability in ASD children, which requires developing a complete understanding of the problem. Since a case study provides bother qualitative and quantitative perspectives, a case study would be the more appropriate approach to give in-depth picture of learning and compression being studied and the broader environment.
Autism should be clinically diagnosed in the standardized assessment data for grades 2, 3, and 4. All the chosen children are expected to be able to communicate using at least five-word sentences on their own. The intervention will begin during the first term of school, and consist of seven 40-minute weekly sessions delivered one-on-one with each child. Finally, assessment sessions would primarily occur in one of the children’s regular classrooms.
The potential value of incorporating multiple case studies allows a researcher to collect a richer and more robust array of evidence than a single method could. Integrating multiple case-study designs would allow for a more in-depth investigation of ASD and reading comprehension abilities in various ways. The first is to highlight individual difficulties with reading comprehension. The second goal is to investigate how the children engaged in an individually tailored reading comprehension intervention based on their individual learning needs and strategies. Finally, to assess their participation in the intervention, such as identifying areas of progression and continued difficulty, as well as personalized awareness and learning reflection. A multiple case study, rather than a single case study, was thought to allow the researcher to explore and answer the research questions fully (Garrett & Hough, 2021). Furthermore, given the heterogeneous nature of people with ASD, a single approach would not qualify for capturing and recognizing individual differences.
Hypothesis Verification
The study aims to analyze the five essential components of instruction, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The focus is comprehension in grade 2, 3, and 4 children with ASD because it includes all the five levels of essential reading components. Specifically, this study sought to answer the following research questions:
- Does reading comprehension intervention that includes instruction in basic reading skills have greater benefits for students with ASD?
- Are verbal abilities and oral comprehension skills correlated with reading comprehension?
- Do students with ASD have different word recognition abilities, reading comprehension, or accuracy than normal children?
Validity
The study will employ a multiple case study series design, with at least five children from each grade participating (grades 2,3, and 4). For all children, assessments would be conducted at least two data collection points: pre-intervention at the start of the school term and a post-test at the end. Following the term break (approximately four weeks), follow-up scores will be obtained to determine if reading comprehension scores changed during a period with no intervention support from teachers.
Ethical Criteria
The targeted participants do not require additional assistance in developing their word recognition process, but they require targeted aid in developing their reading comprehension skills. Once the appropriate participants have been identified, each child’s school’s head teacher and special educational needs coordinator will be contacted by phone and email as applied in other research (Nally et al., 2018; Brady et al.,2021). Communication and approval from the authorities will allow the creation of weekly sessions, relaying the duration of the intervention to the teachers, and discussing the practical arrangement of the classroom setup. Following approval from the principal and the special education needs coordinator, parents will be sent a letter outlining the intervention and requesting informed consent.
Similarly, each child will be visited in school before the intervention to explain the intervention and obtain their consent. The participants’ identities will be concealed while the results are being recorded. Parents or participants would be informed of their right to withdraw consent or stop participating in the study at any time (Nally et al., 2018). Furthermore, parents, teachers, the principal, and the coordinator will be informed about how the data will be used, as well as the critical steps that will be taken to secure the data.
Summary
The study explores the five essential components of reading instructions: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Comprehension is the last level of reading instruction and includes all five elements. Foundations of reading, such as decoding, fluency, and vocabulary, vary according to high-order text processing abilities, which may be limited in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) individuals. Much research indicates that reading comprehension is adequate when coupled and reinforced with other essential components of reading instructions. However, students with ASD find reading and comprehending text difficult, albeit having standard decoding skills as normal kids. Most autistic children have reading profiles with higher decoding skills and worse reading comprehension. Therefore, this research assesses word reading, spelling skills, and phonemic awareness aligned with the cognitive psychology theory. The research method selected to accomplish this study is a multiple case study, which is applicable when there is a need to check for similarities or differences. The multiple case study method is justified because it adequately addresses the research questions due to the heterogeneous nature of individuals with ASD.
The study’s objective is to assess grades 2,4, and 4 students with a clinical diagnosis of autism during a school term. It includes assessing the participants in a regular classroom during the first term, consisting of seven 40-minute weekly sessions. A successful study will help answer the research questions: a) if reading comprehension that includes basic reading skills has greater benefits for students with ASD; b) whether verbal abilities and comprehension skills are correlated with reading comprehension; and c) if discrepancies exist between reading accuracy, word recognition skills, and reading comprehension in students with ASD. Relevant ethical criteria, such as obtaining informed consent from the school head, special educational needs coordinator, parents, and participants, will be followed to ensure the research complies with regulatory requirements. Similarly, necessary procedures will be followed to securely store the data, including hiding identity and allowing the parents or participants to withdraw consent during the research.
References
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