Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience anxiety at higher rates than their neurotypical peers, which can negatively impact school performance. Anxiety symptoms for these students can be challenging to identify because they mimic diagnostic characteristics. As key intervention team members, school-based mental health professionals…

Services are important for many individuals with autism to achieve meaningful post-school outcomes. To understand how to improve service access, it is important to measure services in ways that capture whether an individual's needs are truly being met. Yet, most measures of service access are simplistic, without fully taking into account the vast…

This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning…

The term "creativity" can conjure various ideas and meanings. It's no surprise that methods for measuring such a concept vary widely and are not without controversy. This is particularly true among people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who are a unique yet incredibly diverse group of individuals. This article provides an overview…

Purpose: Neurodiversity-affirming practices for people with autism need to be backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. We discuss aspects of research design and reporting in autism intervention research that should be considered by intervention providers when providing evidence-based practices to support people with autism. We describe risks…

In a recent editorial, Mandy declared an autism mental health crisis and proposed six ideas for how this might be addressed, with which we agree. However, we propose that for these ideas (e.g. training for mental health professionals) to be implemented for psychologists, assumptions about best practice need to be assessed considering the evolving…

Designing effective literacy interventions is a primary topic of importance in educational law, research, and practice (IDEA, 2004; International Dyslexia Association, 2020). The purpose of this article is to examine inclusive approaches to literacy instruction and reading comprehension for students with autism that in turn supports instructional…

The discussion about the words and concepts related to autism is alive in the scholarly community, tacitly or explicitly. Contrasting ideologies linked to the medical model and neurodiversity paradigm underlie terminology referring to autism. The present proof-of-concept study conducted a critical discourse analysis of the terminology (i.e.,…

Typically developing children learn to name things without explicit teaching (Fiorile & Greer, 2007), but this is not always possible when teaching a child with a disability such as autism (Olaff et al., 2017). Labels of nonvisual and internal stimuli are generally harder to teach than visual ones due to the absence of physical reference and…

Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) is an efficient and efficacious methodology to establish equivalence classes that has been used to teach various academic skills to neurotypical adults. Although previous reviews confirmed the utility of EBI with participants with developmental disabilities, it is unclear whether certain procedural parameters…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are included in the general education classroom more often than ever before. Despite mathematical strengths and early success, these students experience poor outcomes (academic and employment) compared to their typically developing peers. The language of mathematics increases in complexity, use, and…

Video-enhanced activity schedule (VidAS) embeds a video model within a visual schedule, then links the images in the visual schedule to a video model clip, completing the step represented in each image. VidAS could leverage the strength of standard visual schedules and offer learners on the autism spectrum extra support to illustrate a sequence of…

Listening to and creating music can be an effective way to help alleviate various symptoms and provide a sense of inner calm. For this reason, music therapy is becoming an increasingly popular form of holistic "healing," particularly for children and adults who are neurodiverse. Playing musical instruments and engaging in music therapy…

A compassionate care framework considers the neurodiverse needs of autistics and challenges the practitioner to think beyond their own comfort levels, preferences, and understanding of "correct" labels to consider how their language and actions support or create barriers for students. The foundational goals of compassionate care seek to…

Emergent literacy skills play an important role in the literacy development of young children. These include code-related skills, such as alphabet knowledge, emergent writing, phonological awareness, and meaning-related skills, such as verbal abilities, story retelling, and text comprehension. Such skills emerge gradually throughout childhood,…