Article from Raisingchildren.net.au
How autism spectrum disorder affects learning and development
- Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develop at a different rate and don’t necessarily develop skills in the same order as typically developing children.
- Children with ASD can find it hard to pay attention to others, communicate, understand other perspectives, and see the big picture. These challenges affect learning and development.
- When you understand your child’s areas of challenge, you can find the best ways to help your child learn
Autism spectrum disorder: how it affects development
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develop at a different rate and don’t necessarily develop skills in the same order as typically developing children.
For example, children with ASD might start to use a few single words around 12 months of age. They might not have the explosion of language that other children have, perhaps learning only a couple of new words each month. It might take them until they’re three years old, or older, to start combining these words together into short phrases.
Or children with ASD might be able to label their own body parts but might not be able to label body parts in pictures. Or they might be able to identify colours but not be able to sort according to colour.
Autism spectrum disorder: how it affects attention and interaction
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) don’t tune into other people in the same way as typically developing babies and children.
For example, children with ASD might not respond to their names, make eye contact, smile at caregivers, or wave goodbye without being told to. Children with ASD also might not use eye contact or point with their fingers to get your attention or communicate.
Using eye contact and gestures to share experiences with others is called joint attention (or shared attention). Children with ASD often have difficulty in this area.
Difficulty with joint attention can make it hard for children with ASD to develop communication and language skills. For example, if a parent is pointing to a picture of a dog, but the child is looking somewhere else, it will be more difficult for the child to learn the link between the picture of a dog and the word ’dog’.
Difficulty with joint attention can also make it hard for these children to learn skills like taking turns, interpreting facial expressions or keeping to the topic of a conversation.
Autism spectrum disorder: how it affects understanding
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) find it hard to see things from other people’s perspectives.
They might have trouble understanding that other people can have desires and beliefs that are different from theirs. They might also find it hard to understand and predict other people’s behaviour, and to understand how their behaviour affects others.
Seeing things from other people’s perspectives is an important social skill. Without it, children with ASD can find it hard to understand and get along with other people.
In everyday life, this can mean that children with ASD don’t understand why another person is upset.
Typically developing children develop these skills at around 3-5 years, but it can take much longer for children with ASD.
Autism spectrum disorder: control and regulation
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can struggle with focus, attention, transitions, organisation, memory, time management, emotional control and frustration. We use these high-level abilities to help us do lots of daily tasks, like working cooperatively with others and prioritising things we need to do.
Difficulties with these abilities can affect children’s learning. For example, while trying to solve a maths problem, a child might know the facts well, but might not be able to come up with a solution. This is because the child can’t organise ideas or put all the information together to solve the problem.
Autism spectrum disorder: seeing the ‘big picture’
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty seeing the ‘big picture’. They can get lost in the details, rather than pulling together different sources of information and seeing the situation as a whole.
For example, when someone who can see the big picture looks at an endless expanse of trees, that person would see ‘the forest’. But someone who can’t see the big picture would see only lots of individual trees.
Difficulty in this area can affect children’s learning and development. For example, after reading a story, a child might remember the small details but forget what the story means overall. A younger child might look at a picture book and focus on details in the background, rather than the characters and the storyline
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