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Teaching children with autism – how to overcome learning disabilities

In order to teach your child effectively and give her the best possible methods of care and learning you have to understand how the brain of your child works since the brain of children with autism works very differently from the one of children developing normally. It is therefore crucial as a parent and as an educator to understand as much as possible of what brain research has found out so that you can create conditions in which your child can learn, grow and prosper.

What is autism?

Autism is a neurological development disorder that is impairing social interaction and communication. Very often autism is accompanied by learning disabilities. In the United States autism is diagnosed in about 2% of children (20 per 1000 children as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC in the year 2012).
Autism shows itself in a wide variety of symptoms. Therefore the diagnosis is made by checking specific behaviors from a list. The official diagnosis is given if a child exhibits at least six of those symptoms. Among them at least following symptoms must occur:

  • two symptoms of qualitative impairment in social interactions
  • one symptom of qualitative impairment in communication
  • one symptom of restricted and repetitive behavior.

Autism is also called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – since there are so many different variations of it. It is a disorder of degrees: impairment can range from mild to severe, with many different symptoms of different severities.

Learning modes

As human beings we have 5 main senses which enable us to acquire immediate information from the environment. Of those, three are absolutely crucial to our understanding of the world: sight, hearing, and touch. The sense of smell and taste, although important as well, do not immediately constitute to our ability to navigate and function properly in our environment.
Psychologists have found that all humans can learn in three different ways: visual (sight), auditory (hearing) and kinesthetic (touch). These are also called learning modes or learning channels.

Every person’s brain is different, and although we process information from all channels (eyes, ears and skin) very early in childhood the brain starts to develop a preference for one or two of these three channels – and becomes increasingly good at acquiring and distilling information through it. Therefore you will notice that when presented with new learning material in a form which you are good at, learning becomes easy, whereas if you get information through a “wrong” channel, you either have to transform it into something you can work with or you will find that you are in the worst case unable to learn the information.

However, in normally developed adults all channels can potentially be used to acquire information, although one or even two of them might be weaker.

Now, with autistic children on the other hand, this tends to take on an extreme form. Many children with autism are able to concentrate solely on one way of acquiring information be it visual, auditory or by movement and touch. They either shut out all the other channels or what also frequently happens are unable to integrate the information of two or even three channels simultaneously and therefore become completely confused and overwhelmed.

Recent research in the inner workings of the brain of autistic children has found out by looking at how the brain works while it is performing certain tasks (so called fMRI studies: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) that there is a big difference between the way brain cells work in autistic and normally developing kids.

In neurophysiology and psychology there are certain classification of how information, which is acquired through our senses, is interpreted. The raw information runs through several layers of abstraction and generalization in the brain before it reaches our consciousness. These layers serve to distill relevant parts in the multitude of sensory information that is constantly flooding our senses. They also enhance certain parts of information and neglect and filter others so that we are able distinguish between urgent and important things (such as a fire or an approaching danger) and unimportant parts (such as e.g. the pattern of the tapestry). The higher the abstraction and generalization the more it is called high level processing, which involves memory, language, organization and attention.

It was found that autistic children are unable or only with great difficulty able to tune out irrelevant details in order to focus on what is important. The brain scans showed that despite of their efforts all areas involved in processing the stimuli were equally busy. Thus, for autistic kids the world is a constantly noisy and unpredictable place.

Generalization

A large part of the processing in these several layers between the raw data coming in from the environment through our senses and our conscious notice thereof is to filter and reduce the amount of information that moves upwards. This is mostly accomplished in our brain by generalizing. Generalization is extremely important for our survival since it enables us to recognize common patterns in similar situations and helps us predict and avoid dangerous ones.

Generalization helps us also to recognize a cat or a house that was drawn on a sheet of paper. Our brain has distilled the relevant parts that make a house a house and is able to recognize it as a such even if it is just a couple of strokes with a pencil.

Autistic kids very often, due to their inability to properly abstract and distill information, have huge difficulties to generalize. Since their mental processing is in comparison based much more on low level recognition like simple geometric shapes (such as triangle, square etc.) they often seem to be unable to generalize the concept of a house and fail to recognize a house when drawn as a series of pencil strokes in a drawing. However they can easily tell you how many triangles and squares there are in that drawing. This is a task that normally developed children and adults find difficult, since these details are removed completely from our perception once we have generalized the line drawing to be a house or cat.

Since many autistic people have great difficulties to generalize and categorize, the inflowing information from the senses is often overwhelming for them. They simply switch off due to mental overload. You can think of it as being all your waking time on Times Square and not being able to shut out any information that comes along.

Practical tips what you can do to help your autistic child

Please note that autism is a very wide neurological disorder that can show many different symptoms. It cannot be guaranteed that any or all tips listed here will be able to help your child and it requires a substantial amount of experimentation to find a combination that is effective for your child. Also note, that it is important to work together with an expert who can guide you and also help you with coping strategies as a parent. Having an autistic child is a huge mental and physical load for any parent and you will benefit if you can share your experiences and get help from qualified experts.

1. Creating a suitable learning environment for a child with autism

In order to reap the best results from any teaching method for your child it is absolutely vital to create an environment, which enables your child to be able to concentrate on what you want to teach her.
As we have seen above, the single most impeding factor for autistic children is their inability to tune out distracting information and to focus on the task at hand. Hence, it is important that you create an environment with as few distractions as possible.

  • Separate room: If you can afford it have a separate room or at least a corner of a room which contains as little furniture as possible – if possible only a desk and a chair and perhaps a shelf.
  • Clean surfaces: Clean up all toys, devices, objects which you do not immediately need or use for your teaching lesson. Store them in a place where they cannot be seen nor heard.
  • No distractions: Remove all electronic devices that could emit any kind of signal such as flashing or beeping. Such events will most likely upset and interrupt the focus and concentration of your child to such an extent that you have to cancel the learning session.
  • Appropriate lighting: Autistic children are very sensitive to changes of lighting conditions. Use uniform, unchanging, non-aggressive and non-distracting illumination. It is known that many autistic kids respond very badly to fluorescent light, since it flickers and thus creates visual noise. Normally developed children and adults ignore the flickering naturally – and very often many adults do not even understood that fluorescent light could cause a distraction for an autistic child. The best lighting is usually daylight close to a window as long as there are no objects which cast shadows and move due to wind or other circumstances. The lighting must stay as constant and unchanged as possible.
  • Reduce any noise or sound emissions: make sure to turn off your phone, cell phone and doorbell during the time you are learning with your child. Make sure that no device or other appliance in your house will emit any sounds during the learning session. Many autistic children are very sensitive to noise and sounds, to a degree that you hardly believe possible. Sometimes they perceive even a normal voice as loud as a trumpet blowing into their ears. Ask your child if there is anything she can still hear that would be distracting her before you start.
  • No touch distractions: Make sure that there is nothing to touch that could take away the focus from your teaching efforts. Look at your child’s clothing. Are there any objects, which the child could start playing with (ribbons, etc.). Try to have as smooth, even sterile touch conditions as possible.
  • Limit used objects: Make sure that there are no unnecessary objects at all in the room that would take away the child’s attention or distract in any way.
  • Hide cables and use a laptop: If you are working with a computer, make sure that all the cables are well packed and hidden as much as possible. It is better to work with a laptop computer since usually the fan is much less noisy. If you use a desktop computer use a flat screen monitor, since a CRT flickers like a fluorescent light and is very distracting for children with autism.
  • Desensitize: If the autistic child is hypersensitive to auditory signals and you know that there is the possibility of infrequent noises such as doorbells, fire alarms, school bells etc. try to limit them and shield them as much as possible since these signals can cause terror in autistic children due to their loudness and unexpectedness. You can try to desensitize your child by recording these sounds on a tape recorder or a similar device and allow her to play them whenever and as often as she wants and needs to. The important thing is that the child can exert control on when to hear them. This will lead in time to a desensitization due to the habituation to the sounds so that the child will not panic any more once she hears the same sound in a real setting.

2. Children with autism: useful teaching methods

Many learning and teaching methods that work for normally developed kids will unfortunately not work with children suffering from autism. Autistic children very often concentrate on one learning mode only and are not able to cope with information presented on different channels (visual, auditory or kinesthetic) at the same time. This overload of information will overwhelm them.
Therefore it is crucial that you adapt the teaching style to the specific needs of your autistic child.

  1. It is most important that you find out what kind of learning channel your child is using to acquire new information. Autistic children most often have only one single learning mode, however sometimes they are able to receive information also on two channels simultaneously. Be careful not to overload the child. Focus on the channel, which the autistic child is best at. This will greatly improve your rate of success in teaching the child. If you are teaching the child as a parent keep with this learning mode only. If you are a teacher working with several children in a classroom setting try at least to emphasize the learning channel suitable for the autistic child when addressing him or her directly.
  2. Split channels: there is a lot of information that contains data to be learned on two different channels. Since teaching this kind of information to the child directly might overwhelm her try to split the information such that you use only one channel at the time. If you use for example some audiovisual information, teach first the audio part then the visual part separately. When both things have been learned it will be easier for the child to combine both channels (however: see below).
  3. Due to the different way of processing sensory information (mostly low level processing) autistic children very often show a lot of problems in generalization. It can happen that children shown a route through a garden or building will be completely confused when the lighting conditions change and different shadows are cast. Also when showing the child a certain action such as how to cross the street or how turn the lights on it frequently happens that the child is not able to extract from the scene the relevant parts, which you wanted to show her. She might for example infer wrongly, that she can cross the street only at that particular location, and only when exactly the same cars are present. Or she might think that turning on the light switch is only possible in exactly the same movement pattern that you showed her. Therefore you will have to teach the child the same thing again and again in different circumstances and at different locations and with slight variations so that she is able to ignore the locations and cars involved and learn only the things that stayed the same (i.e. the actual act of crossing the street, independently of the particular circumstances such as the exact location or particular cars).
  4. In the very same way autistic children very often are not able to extract objects from noisy backgrounds, in particular when you teach them the names of objects the first time. It is here that a spaced repetition software such as our Flashcard Learner software can create a tremendous benefit for the child and for yourself. The software is able to make sure that the child will be reminded again and again of the objects she has to learn. Additionally by entering several different images of the object such as a chair in many different positions and shapes or cars with different colors and shapes, from the front, the back, the side, from the left and the right you will be helping your child to generalize the relevant objects. Similarly all this different images will cancel out the irrelevant parts which do not belong to the actual object and are simple background noise. When teaching the child from images it is also important to first have the object isolated (such that only the object itself is visible) and then slowly adding more and more background noise so that the child is able to recognize and identify the objects even in visually very noisy environments. Flashcard Learner helps you with this task by searching images on the Internet for a given keyword. You simply select, which images you would like to add and they will be added to the flashcards to learn. So you can create easily a stack with 5 or even 10 flashcards of a chair or a car with very little effort. You can download Flashcard Learner here and try it freely to test it and see if it will help you with teaching your autistic child.
  5. It is very useful to use a digital camera to record items in your house and add them to the spaced repetition data base. Like that you will also have the opportunity to make pictures from different angles so that your child will recognize the objects.
  6. Autistic children frequently don’t possess the ability to connect sensory information that follow one after the other. It is as if each moment is a completely unique and separate world and there is no continuity between one moment and the next. So they will not be able to combine actions that are connected. Autistic children often have problems making a connection between an image of an object and the written representation thereof if it is not presented exactly at the same time so that she can learn that those two things are the same. If you use flashcards to teach your child reading make sure that for example the word “car” and the image of a car are on the same side of the flashcard to explicitly show, that they are the same thing.
  7. One frequent symptom with autistic children is their obsession with a particular object or event. This obsession gives them safety since they know all there is to know about it and can be sure that nothing will change. You can use this obsession to your advantage when teaching the child. By embedding references to the object(s) the child likes, you can create interest and motivation to go through the learning session.

While not a comprehensive list, the learning methods above will provide you with ample opportunity to extend and improve the learning behavior of an autistic child. With the aid of special computer programs, such as Flashcard Learner you will reduce the load on your shoulder and make sure that your child will be able to extract concepts and objects from images and thus will be able to generalize and learn more and more words and connections. Additionally, since the computer software keeps track of the learning process and makes sure that all your flashcards will be learned to the highest possible degree you don’t have to worry about it any more. Simply concentrate on providing your child with more and more information in different settings and contexts and soon you will notice how much more your child will be able to extract meaningful information from her environment and progress at a rate, which you would not have believed possible before.

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