Cutting-Edge Research Could Help Students with Autism

As autism diagnoses increase — many estimates put the chances of having a child with autism at a staggering 1 in 150 — more research will be conducted to determine the best ways to support and educate individuals with autism. If you are the parent of a child with autism, you are probably extremely familiar with the unique challenges presented during tutoring sessions. Autistic children usually do not benefit from the same academic structures that so-called typical children do.

Why is this? At its most simple (and, indeed, the reality is far more nuanced and complicated), autism is caused by a "differently wired" brain. (Early literature on autism may have said "miswired" or "wrongly wired," but that description is neither accurate nor fair to individuals with autism, who are capable of learning in ways that many of us are not).

In the autistic brain, there are strong connections between brain regions that are close to one another, but abnormally weak connections between brain regions that are farther apart. This "missed connection" reveals itself in several ways; perhaps the most common and noticeable manifestation in children with autism is difficulty with visual-motor processing.

Children with typical visual-motor processing can watch others perform motor skills (such as tying a shoe or catching a ball), and learn how to mimic and eventually master that behavior. For children with autism, the connection between seeing and doing is not so simple. The weakness in the long-distance brain-region connections makes such mimicry and mastery difficult. (This is also the reason why autistic individuals often have a very difficult time "reading" the actions or body language of those around them; an "annoyed" signal, like crossed arms, or a "happy" signal, like a broad smile, often do not translate to the person with autism.)

With all of this in mind, researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine undertook an important new study, the results of which were just released this week. The researchers discovered that children with autism depend on their own innate sense of body position, rather than on visual information, to acquire new skills and learn new patterns of movement. These findings have tremendous implications for tutoring children with autism. When designing a tutoring session for your child, always keep in mind the fact that she is a kinetic learner (read more about this learning style in my post here). She learns best not by seeing or hearing, but rather by doing. She acquires skills when she has a strong sense of her place within the learning environment.

Researchers are already planning ways to move the Kennedy Krieger/Johns Hopkins study from the theoretical academic sphere into reality. The study's results could mark a sea change in early intervention practices for toddlers and young children with autism. It is thought that not only can kinetic instruction help with motor-skill mastery, it can also teach children to understand social cues. For individuals with autism, who often find it frustratingly difficult to "read" the people around them, this could be a life-changing advancement.

To read a summary of the brand new study, click here. To find a tutor who can work with your family in developing a plan that suits an autistic child's needs you can use the resources found on TutorsAnywhere.com.