Autism and Reading Part 2: Lessons to be Learned from Special Kids

  • 24 May, 2025
  • 22 Comments

 In my previous blog, I explored what is known about the decoding abilities of students plagued with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Here we’ll explore what is known about their reading comprehension abilities – both with an eye towards providing helpful guidance to teachers who work with these children and to consider what that work has to say about reading comprehension generally.

In that earlier piece, I quoted extensively from a letter from Emily Iland, an expert on autism. She, based on her extensive personal experience, described various special reading comprehension problems kids with ASD may face. These problems are common to many kids with ASD but not so prevalent with everyone else.

Nevertheless, if there are certain skills or types of information with which these students struggle, other kids may evidence those problems too – just not as severely or consistently.

One common finding is that kids on the autism spectrum usually comprehend less well than they decode, and this is true whether or not they have decoding difficulties (Brown, et al., 2012; Henderson, Clarke, & Snowling, 2014; McClain, et al., 2021; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nicolosi & Dillenburger, 2024; Randi, Newman, & Grigorenko, 2010 ; Sorenson, et al., 2021 ; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017). Admittedly, there are also kids on the spectrum who appear to comprehend well. Though, having read much of the recent literature, I doubt that typical comprehension tests are sufficiently sensitive to identify these kids’ problems.

Most of the reading research on kids with ASD has been of the single subject variety (McClain, et al., 2021). In these studies, researchers intervene usually with 1-3 students to see if an instructional approach works. Typically, these studies have been of short duration and with measures of dubious reliability. Such studies are better used to guide future research than instruction.

It is also worth noting that there are several studies that treat ASD like any other reading disability, simply increasing the dosage or intensity of what appears to work reasonably well with everyone else (Head, 2023; Kim, 2023; Kim, et al., 2024; Marshall & Myers, 2021; O’Neil, 2024; Ricketts, 2011; Turner, Remington, & Hill, 2017). Such studies evaluate whether shared reading, story mapping, direct instruction, intensive review, increased scaffolding, graphic organizers and such can work with ASD, if delivered under positive circumstances (e.g., one-on-one teaching) or with increased dosage. Generally, these studies report positive outcomes. What their success would be like in regular classroom settings is anyone’s guess. In any event, there appear to be learning pay offs from intensified or improved delivery of typical comprehension instruction.  

However, ASD poses some special problems that might require more than improved “business as usual” routines.  

Most prominent among these possibilities is the need for a pedagogical approach that addresses the difficulty these students often have with social interactions. Autism is often characterized in terms of social communication difficulties.

Reading comprehension depends not just on reading skills and language abilities per se, but also upon knowledge relevant to the content of the texts. Prior knowledge – the knowledge that someone brings to a text – is essential for comprehending.

Of course, not all texts depend upon an understanding of social communication. Science texts, for instance, usually require little interpretation of nonverbal communication, human intentions and motivation, or non-literal language like sarcasm, idiomatic expressions, or figurative language. On the other hand, the comprehension of literature depends heavily upon such information and insight, as do history texts and many articles on current affairs.

Emily, in her letter to me, points out the difficulty kids with ASD have in predicting what will happen in stories. Such predictions are often contingent on what actions characters are likely to take. That means the reader must recognize what it is that is motivating the characters – what they want, how badly they want it. But that is the kind of information that children on the spectrum are not likely to have.

Is there any evidence that kids with ASD struggle particularly with those aspects of reading comprehension?

Yes. In fact, there is. Research shows that individuals with ASD have problems understanding the mental states of others (Kimhi, et al., 2025; Lee, Chan, & Tong, 2022; O’Hare, et al., 2009). This is what is meant by “theory of mind.” At least part of the reason for the socialization problems ASD kids face is their difficulties intuiting the feelings and intentions of others. This makes empathy a challenge and undermines their comprehension of social situations and relations.

A very cool study from the Czech Republic tested students’ general reading comprehension along with what the researchers called the “Strange Stories” test (Sotáková, & Kucharská, 2017). These stories were designed to reveal an understanding of the social moves people make. Social moves that are difficult to interpret for people on the autism spectrum, including lies, misunderstandings, sarcasm, attempts to persuade, jokes, and pretending.

For example, here is a sarcasm story and its questions:

“Sarah and Tom are going on a picnic. It is Tom’s idea; he says it is going to be a lovely sunny day for a picnic. But just as they are unpacking the food, it starts to rain and soon they are both soaked to the skin. Sarah is cross. She says: ‘Oh yes, a lovely day for a picnic alright!’.

1. Is it true what Sarah says?

2. Why does she say this?”

Autism affected these students’ answers. They often failed to recognize the literal inaccuracies – what Sarah said was false. They struggled with these texts more than did their normally developing peers. Their performance on these texts had a strong correlation with their general reading comprehension as well.

Typical reading tests aren’t aimed at identifying social insensitivity. They may include questions that probe the psychology of characters including motivations or emotional responses to events. But that usually isn’t the point of such questions. I know that because these queries are likely to be labeled as literal recall, inferencing, main ideas, supporting details, drawing conclusions, cause and effect – monikers that totally miss the point of the reasons for students’ errors. Those tests offer no direction when it comes to the kinds of instruction that might improve students’ abilities to handle such questions. Having kids practicing with “drawing conclusions” questions won’t cut the mustard.

Sad to say, though the research has identified this gap, it hasn’t provided any solutions.  Obviously, we can continue to include these kids in shared, guided or directed reading situations hoping that over time they’ll gain some purchase on these concepts]. That seems ineffectual to me.

How might this problem be addressed? My answer is through explicit teaching.

I think it would be better to explain to readers that people have emotional reactions to events – that some things may make us happy, sad, or angry. Then I’d expose them to a series of stories in which the events elicit such reactions among the characters. At first, I’d model, telling the students how I thought a character reacted and why. Then, I’d guide students to try to infer emotional reactions in other stories, perhaps with some kind of multiple-choice scheme. Then we’d explore what might make someone jealous or hurt their feelings, and so on; again, linking these to the events in the stories the kids are reading. I can imagine some pretty cool graphic organizers identifying character motivations and emotional reactions.

Another challenge to kids with ASD that Ms. Island alerted me to is the difficulty that many children with ASD have in connecting the ideas in a text. The research supports that insight (Cain & Norbury, 2005; Davidson & Weismer, 2017; Sotáková, & Kucharská, 2017). Many of these kids can understand and remember specific facts from a text but making connections among those ideas – coming up with a main idea or cogent summary may be well-nigh impossible for them.

Again, students on the spectrum can get so intensively focused on the specifics that they miss the overall point, like comprehending individual sentences but missing the cohesive links and author’s intentions.

As with the difficulties in interpreting social cues, the research does a good job of identifying the problem, but experimental instruction targeted specifically on what it is that is hard for these kids just doesn’t exist. Here, however, there have been some small, positive steps suggesting that teaching kids how to use cohesive links may be helpful. That makes sense to me, as would efforts to guide these students to “build up” an understanding of a text: reading a sentence and talking about it, then reading a second, and focusing on its connections with the first, and so on.

Why does all this matter?

First, many kids are being identified as having ASD. Some estimates suggest the likelihood that there is one such child in every classroom. That commonality means that all reading teachers should know something about it.

Second, I subscribe to the premise that these kinds of comprehension difficulties are likely apparent in other kids, too. The frequency and consistency of the problems may differ, but they show up well beyond the spectrum. If we can figure out how best to address these challenges with ASD kids, then we’ll have some proven ways to help everyone else a bit.

Third, because of the qualitative nature of these problems – kids having difficulty with certain kinds of information – it should be apparent that just asking certain kinds of questions will not help many to surmount such difficulties. These problems make the need for explicit comprehension instruction – not just practice – noticeable.

Fourth, this research points out why our reading comprehension questioning schemes fail to tell us anything more than who comprehends well. The kinds of questions that we ask supposedly provide rehearsal with certain kinds of cognitive actions – which we know doesn’t work – rather than identifying the type of information students struggle with or pinpointing why students may fail to understand a text.

References

Brown, H. M., Oram-Cardy, J., & Johnson, A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the reading comprehension skills of individuals on the autism spectrum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 932-955. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1638-1

Davidson, M. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2017). Reading comprehension of ambiguous sentences by school?age children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 10(12), 2002-2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1850

Grimm, R. P., Solari, E. J., McIntyre, N. S., Zajic, M., & Mundy, P. C. (2018). Comparing growth in linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension in school-aged children with autism versus typically developing children. Autism Research: Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research11(4), 624–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1914

Head, C. N. (2023). The effects of direct instruction on reading comprehension for individuals with autism or intellectual disability. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Auburn University. 

Henderson, L. M., Clarke, P. J., & Snowling, M. J. (2014). Reading comprehension impairments in autism spectrum disorders. L'Année Psychologique, 114(4), 779-797. https://doi.org/10.4074/S0003503314004084

Keller?Margulis, M. A., Mire, S. S., Loría Garro, E. S., Jellinek?Russo, E. R., Lozano, I., Hut, A. R., Luu, M.?L. N., Izuno?Garcia, A. K., Erps, K. H., Landry Pierce, L. N., Tan, S. X., McNeel, M. M., Gardner, S. M., & Duran, B. J. (2024). Measuring academic skill development for students with autism spectrum disorder using curriculum?based measurement: A scoping review and call for research. Psychology in the Schools, 61(5), 2132–2147. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.23154 

Kim, S. (2023). The use of technology to teach reading skills to individuals with autism spectrum disorder: Systematic quality review, meta-analysis, and single-case research evaluation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Purdue University.

Kim, S. Y., Rispoli, M., Mason, R. A., Lory, C., Gregori, ER., Roberts, C. A., Whitfrod, D., & Wang, D. (2024). The effects of using adapted science eBooks within shared reading on comprehension and task engagement of students with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Austims and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-024-06525-w

Kimhi, Y., Mirsky, Y., & Bauminger-Zviely, N. (2025). The role of theory of mind, executive functions, and central coherence in reading comprehension for children with ASD and typical development. Journal of autism and developmental disorders55(4), 1302–1317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-024-06272-y

Lee, H. K., Chan, W. S., & Tong, S. X. (2022). The heterogeneity and interrelationships among theory of mind, executive function, and reading comprehension deficits in Hong Kong Chinese children with autism. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10298-y

McClain, M. B., Haverkamp, C. R., Benallie, K. J., Schwartz, S. E., & Simonsmeier, V. (2021). How effective are reading comprehension interventions for children with ASD? A meta-analysis of single-case design studies. School Psychology, 36(2), 107–121. 

https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000424

Nation, K., & Norbury, C. F. (2005). Why reading comprehension fails: Insights from developmental disorders. Topics in Language Disorders, 25(1), 21–32. 

https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-200501000-00004

Nicolosi, M., & Dillenburger, K. (2024). The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study. Behavioral Interventions, 39(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bin.2007

O’Hare, A. E., Bremner, L., Nash, M., Happ., F., & Pettigrew, L. M. (2009). A clinical assessment tool for advanced theory of mind performance in 5 to 12 year olds. Journal of Autism and Development Disorders, 39, 916–928. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0699-2

O’Neil, M. (2024). Improving reading comprehension among students with autism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Grand Canyon University.

Randi, J., Newman, T. & Grigorenko, E. L. (2010). Teaching children with autism to read for meaning: Challenges and possibilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 890–902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0938-6

Ricketts J. (2011). Research review: reading comprehension in developmental disorders of language and communication. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines52(11), 1111–1123. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02438.x

Ricketts, J., Jones, C. R., Happ., F., & Charman, T. (2013). Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: The role of oral language and social functioning. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 807–816. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1619-4

Solis, M., & McKenna, J. W. (2023). Reading instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder: Comparing observations of instruction to student reading profiles. Journal of

Behavioral Education. 

Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S. H., & Smith, I. M. (2021). Building meaning: Meta?analysis of component skills supporting reading comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 14(5), 840-858. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2483

Sotáková, H., & Kucharská, A. (2017). The level of social relations comprehension and its impact on text comprehension in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. Health Psychology Report, 5(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5114/hpr.2017.62725

Turner, H., Remington, A., & Hill, V. (2017). Developing an intervention to improve reading comprehension for children and young people with autism spectrum disorders. Educational and Child Psychology, 34(2), 13–26.

 

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Tina C May 23, 2025 09:38 PM

Do you have any resources that explain how to teach students how to use "cohesive links?"

Timothy Shanahan May 24, 2025 06:35 AM

Tina -- Here are some links that you might find helpful.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-instruction-that-really-helps-teaching-cohesion

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/seatwork-that-makes-sense-for-reading

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/publications/improving-reading-comprehension

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/publications/letting-text-take-center-stage

tim

Jackie May 24, 2025 09:42 AM

This is such a welcome article for those of us with family children on the spectrum. Although it's obvious, it's also worth saying that teacher talk is part of reading instruction—woe betide the ASD child whose teacher tends toward sarcastic rebuttals.

Caroline Erdos May 24, 2025 12:26 PM

This article could be very helpful to many teachers, but I hesitate to share it because of the phrase “plagued with autism”. The word “plagued” runs counter to the understanding of autism as one type of neurodivergence to be supported and accepted as having the same place as others in society that we hope to instil in our teachers.

Suzanne Magee May 24, 2025 01:01 PM

I faithfully read your blog each Saturday, and value your opinion, but I am also uncomfortable with word choices like “burdened” and “plagued” used to characterize children with autism. Please consider revising the posts. Honestly, I was surprised you hadn’t revised last week’s post after readers brought it to your attention in the comments.

Roisin Downey May 24, 2025 01:04 PM

I agree with Caroline on the wording here! You might be plagued with headline or constant back pain. You are not plagued by developmental differences that are core to your identity and understanding of the world - at least that would be our understanding in the Irish system. Overall a helpful article aside from that.

Beth Hankoff May 24, 2025 05:13 PM

I am autistic. I support readers' comments above and on your last post about how you refer to autism. I am a credentialed teacher and business owner, offering customized tutoring to homeschoolers. I'm not plagued or burdened, and neither are my autistic students. Our brains are different, and our IQs are often high. Our understandings and socialization are different from neurotypicals, but not inferior. New studies are showing that we understand each other’s social cues much more than neurotypicals. We speak a different social language rather than lacking one.

There is a lot of truth in your post, but we need to be careful about thinking of austistics from a deficit viewpoint. When I read about autism research, I wonder if any austistics were consulted on the process and the interpretation of the results. Also, I wonder how many girls were included, since boys are much more frequently diagnosed with autism, and the presentation in boys vs girls is quite different.

From personal experience, I can see that when autistic children struggle with ELA skills, one-on-one direct instruction is best. It's not just about understanding reading and writing. Generally speaking, we want to know the “why” of things before putting in the effort. Once we are told the why, that can help tremendously. Why one-on-one? In the classroom, there is a lot of sensory input. While we are trying to cope with it, the teacher stands up front and explains something. We don't necessarily know the unwritten rule that we are supposed to look and listen. I have worked with this issue by getting the class started and then walking by my student to see if they know what to do. If not, I give them instruction at their desk so they can focus on me. Working with them one-on-one in tutoring allows this focus, and also allows adjustment of the lesson to meet their needs.

One final tip - use those intense interests as a positive. If they want to read non-fiction about a topic, let them! Watch how they light up when learning is meaningful.

Elizabeth May 24, 2025 06:22 PM

I do respectfully agree with the commentary noted above with your word choice. As someone on the spectrum and with an autistic child, it really makes it difficult to get to the meat of your proposal.

Having said that, I do hope you continue with this topic, as it is desperately needed and the attention you are drawing to it is greatly appreciated. I do hope that in your findings, you address whether any research is suited to Gestalt Language Processors and explicit instruction. So far, I have not found much, but I’d be curious to know whether you have any connections that may be a guiding light on where to look for such recommendations, as a hefty bit of students with ASD tend to be GLPs.

Again, I appreciate your attention to this topic, and hope that in the future, you reconsider your word choice.

Emily Iland May 24, 2025 08:36 PM

We have many common views about this issue (except for the word plagued). YES to explicit instruction, absolutely. Here's an insight from my son Tom that led to the title of my book: Drawing A Blank. When he was about 13, he told me, "Mom, if it hasn't happened to me, my mind is a blank page."

In response to this incredible revelation, when I was in effect his daily tutor for several years, I STOPPED asking the question, "How would you feel IF..." because the answer was ALWAYS "I don't know." Instead I asked, "How did you feel WHEN..." He could answer questions about himself and his experiences. I taught him to understand the feelings of characters by having him stop to compare their experiences to his own, then transfer his feelings to them. It worked.

Another point is that many students with ASD are NOT responding to current Evidence-Based Practices! (Vaughn & Fletcher 2012, Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002). My view is that the unique cognitive profile of these students gets in the way of learning many pre-requisite skills needed for EPBs such as summarization strategies, and need direct instruction on the pre-requisite skills (such as finding the main idea) first. This is particularly relevant in the current era of Response to Intervention (RTI)!

This and more helpful information is coming in the updated version of Drawing A Blank: Improving Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum. Future Horizons expects to publish it in 2026. I am encouraged by your the thoughtful blog and the interest of readers!

Timothy Shanahan May 24, 2025 09:04 PM

Roisin--

I do see having difficulty learning to read as a serious problem -- that you think it is beneficial or good surprises me.

tim

Anon User May 25, 2025 12:01 AM

As an autist myself, I encourage you to be honest and direct in your assessments. Don't change your wording because it makes some people uncomfortable. Calling autism a divergence and tiptoeing around the reasons you think it requires special support is not a kindness. It is merely patronizing. This is especially true when addressing more severe cases of autism.

Timothy Shanahan May 25, 2025 06:24 AM

Beth--
I think you are overgeneralizing from your own positive experience. There are many people on the autism spectrum who have little or no difficulty learning academic material and for them autism may not be a difficulty, problem, burden, or plague -- just an interesting difference. But, of course, those weren't the people that I was writing about.

Far too many kids struggle with literacy due to their ASD and struggling with literacy has many unfortunate longterm consequences. For them, ASD is burdensome. Pretending that it is just a difference and not a potentially disabling factor (in terms of academic learning or social participation) denies the experience of a substantial proportion of kids with ASD).

tim

Timothy Shanahan May 25, 2025 06:33 AM

Suzanne--
You should go back and read this more carefully. I never characterized children with ASD as burdensome or a plague. Never have and never would. That never happened and no careful reading of this could be construed as saying that.

I did use those terms to describe impact of ASD on students' reading lives (it is ASD that is burdensome to the kids who struggle with it) -- which the research is very clear about. ASD is not a positive factor or a useful difference when it comes to learning to read.

tim

Irina McPherson May 25, 2025 06:54 AM

I agree w/ Dr. Shanahan's responses re "plagued" terminology referring to the challenges some autistic individuals have when reading (NOT the individuals themselves). The difficulties he is describing are, in fact, problems, that should be treated as such and remedied appropriately, not accepted as inevitable characteristics of autism or autistic individuals.

Teresa May 25, 2025 09:39 PM

This article, albeit part two, was very insightful! Thank you!

Lillian May 27, 2025 04:12 PM

I commend you for not backing down regarding what some see as "problematic" language.Some conditions in life are bad and language can't save us from that. I also find Beth's comment really dismissive of people with severe Autism.



This whole exchange reminds me of a quote from Friedrich Engels, "These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves". We could commit to only using positive adjectives and yet we would still have problems in the world.

Anna M Caveney May 28, 2025 11:51 PM

"In my previous blog, I explored what is known about the decoding abilities of students plagued with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). "
please re read that again
Then imagine you have ASD, or care for someone with ASD, which exists in a spectrum of life altering traits. While I very much appreciate your sharing useful information on things those nurturing Autistic people in their reading lives need to know, I really wish you would re read what you wrote and say it out loud. I have no doubt that your intent was to refer to those autistics for whom their autistic traits severely impair their lives, and in your area of interest impairments of their reading development.
But what you said was 'students plagued with autism spectrum disorders' .
My autistic child said she would have been less offended by cursed, but clarifying that 'for many autistics their variations have challenging consequences in their reading and comprehension journey' would have been less upsetting and conveyed the content you are so kind as to share.
Imagine writing : plagued with deafness, plagued with vision impairment, plague with achondroplasia, plagued with low IQ.... none of them _feel respectful_.
They would each feel as if a complex expereince of being a nonstandard model of human had been been defined in an entirely negative way. For some autistics, their variation is severely life impairing and often includes seizures and consequences of genetic disorders, but for others much of their life impairment is in the inflexibility of the majority variation defining difference as wrongness.
Thank you for sharing the research and advice.

Arthur Unobskey May 27, 2025 05:35 PM

The impact that current comprehension tests have on the reading experience of adolescents--particularly students who can easily become disengaged--also deserves further discussion. As Professor Shanahan says, common question formats on standardized tests (involving questions about "main ideas, supporting details, drawing conclusions," etc.) push students towards abstraction and meta-cognition and away from connecting to the characters and the plot. As they read, students are directed to label passages as evidence of a particular theme, rather than focusing on a character's fascinating experiences.

Nurturing the emotional connection between the reader and the text is critical for engaging ALL students.


Suzanne C May 27, 2025 06:27 PM

Autism isn’t a disease that needs to be eradicated. Describing students as “plagued with Autism Spectrum Disorder” is dated, medicalised and stigmatising. If your intent was to say “plagued with reading difficulties caused by ASD,” then I think it’s fair to ask — why not say that directly?

Timothy Shanahan May 27, 2025 10:33 PM

Suzanne-- We disagree. Your position is like saying blindness is great except for the fact the blind can't see.

tim

Suzanne C May 28, 2025 05:24 AM

Thanks for your response, Tim. I think it’s important to clarify that autism isn’t the same as blindness. Blindness is a sensory impairment; autism is a neurotype — a difference in how the brain processes information and experiences the world. Many autistic people don’t see themselves as “plagued” by their neurology, even though they may face significant challenges, particularly in environments not designed with neurodiversity in mind (hello, education system!).

My concern isn’t with acknowledging those challenges — it’s with how we describe them. Language like “plagued with ASD” risks reinforcing outdated and stigmatising views that position autism as a disease or affliction. That kind of framing affects how students are perceived, included and supported.

This isn’t about denying the reality of difficulty — it’s about ensuring our language respects the people we’re talking about. Especially in education, our words have power and shape how students see themselves.

Timothy Shanahan May 29, 2025 05:56 PM

Anna-
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there are a number of "neurodevelopmental disorders" including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, learning disabilities, intellectual disability (also known as mental retardation), conduct disorders, cerebral palsy, and impairments in vision and hearing.

The APA's DSM-5 categorizes neurodevelopmental disorders into six categories: intellectual, communication, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity, motor, and specific learning disorders like dyslexia (a term they no longer use because of its lack of diagnostic value). All these disorders by definition negatively impact a person's functioning in one or more domains of life (personal, social, academic, occupational). A diagnosis of ASD requires not only ASD symptoms but symptoms that disrupt or impair functioning in ways that would be developmentally or socially inappropriate.

According to the experts, if someone is diagnosed with ASD (and who doesn't just have some vague symptoms of it) is a disorder that causes distress, impairment, disruption in the lives of individuals so diagnosed.

Doesn't sound good to me!

Respectfully,

tim

tim

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Autism and Reading Part 2: Lessons to be Learned from Special Kids

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One of the world’s premier literacy educators.

He studies reading and writing across all ages and abilities. Feel free to contact him.

Timothy Shanahan is one of the world’s premier literacy educators. He studies the teaching of reading and writing across all ages and abilities. He was inducted to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007, and is a former first-grade teacher.  Read more

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