ASDEX: Autism Spectrum Disorder Students and EXperimentation

About one to two percent of all children have been identified with autism spectrum disorder. One of them was Dawn-joy Leong. The artist and researcher recounted her school days in a guest lecture at an Australian university: " I can honestly say that I learned next to nothing at school (). I spent almost every excruciating hour in school longing to go home. () There I could draw, paint and create and do my chemistry, biology and agricultural experiments. Midway through high school, I was relegated to the arts stream, where they throw everyone deemed too stupid to study science. () I was very good at biology, I could manage chemistry because there was the visual and sensory dimension to hold onto, but () I just could not manage abstract mathematics." People with autism can be very different and develop very differently - depending on whether they experience supportive conditions. They all have two characteristics in common: Difficulties in communication and social interactions on the one hand, special interests and the need for structures and rituals on the other. Some children and young people with autism are as gifted as many others, some significantly less so. Some are above average in a few areas, while they have difficulties in others. Due to their social and communicative peculiarities, they often find it difficult to integrate into a class community. Some have interests that are not comprehensible to their classmates. Many children with autism experience bullying at school because they and their way of forming social relationships are rejected by their classmates. What should a lesson look like that meets the needs of these pupils? In our project, we want to give children with autism the chance to discover their spirit of research and to be challenged by doing more experiments in their classes. On the one hand, experimenting follows clear structures because an experiment has to be thoroughly planned, carried out and recorded. But an experiment is also something highly creative because you have to develop new ideas and test them. Chance observations showed that children with autism suddenly cooperated with classmates in experiment lessons almost naturally, to the surprise of their teachers. Well- designed experimentation lessons could therefore achieve two things with these children: Learning could become easier and more satisfying, and contact with classmates could be improved. We want to test these hypotheses by comparing how young people with autism who regularly do experiments in their classes over a longer period of time develop in comparison to those who work on the same topics in frontal lessons. If you are interested in the study or have any questions, please contact us!

The project ASDEX (students with Autism Spectrum Disorder and EXperiments in science) was triggered by observations in pre-service biology teacher education, that autistic students participated in group activities with experiments in a way their teachers had never observed before. Consequently, a team from Graz University bringing together expertise from inclusive education and biology didactics developed a study to compare the influence of group experimentation on knowledge development and social interaction for adolescents with autism in regular classes. This was different to the common approach to foster autistic students' development mostly in individual settings or small groups. Within the project, ten classes of grades 6 - 8 with overall 226 students either participated in group experimentation within specifically designed lessons, or they worked about the same topics, also in groups, in a more theoretical approach. While the kind of teaching they experienced did not have a measurable effect on knowledge development, positive social interactions did increase markedly for those students observed in experimental classes: The number of positive interactions with other students per minute teaching time in experiment lessons was almost twice the number of such interactions in regular lessons. On the other hand, the number of such interactions was slightly lower in more theoretical comparison lessons. Interviews with teachers and students supported these data. For example, one student with autism said: "So, these [experimental] units have shown me that you can actually work quite well in groups, in class, not just alone. Usually, I prefer to work alone, but it was actually fun to work with the others." One teacher involved in the project stated about her students on the spectrum: "I found it fascinating that they were totally active and interested." While this approach has to be considered as a first attempt to foster social interaction of autistic students through group experimentation, no generalization can yet be drawn due to the limited number of participating students with autism (N=18). Yet these results seem very encouraging and should inspire follow-up work to make our classrooms more inclusive and give students on the autism spectrum, who are often very interested in natural sciences, the opportunity to contribute their knowledge and skills in group work. [All educational material developed during the project is freely available under https://oer-portal.uni-graz.at/edu-sharing/components/render/8f7b8572-d12f-4206-a9eb-25b02a784897.]