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

 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

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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 Research, 11(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. 

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