The increase of underprepared students entering college decreases persistence and graduation rates at postsecondary institutions, ultimately declining degree attainment and social mobility of American citizens (U.S. Department of Education, 2016; McGuire, 2018). ACT, Inc. (2017) data suggests that overwhelming percentages of high school graduates…

Anxiety in autism is commonly reported by parents, but teacher reports of anxiety in their students with autism have received little attention. This paper presents the results from the first systematic review on anxiety in children with autism at school. Six intervention studies (five of which were based upon cognitive-behavioural therapy) and 26…

This study explores six item-reduction methodologies used to shorten an existing complex problem-solving non-objective test by evaluating how each shortened form performs across three sources of validity evidence (i.e., test content, internal structure, and relationships with other variables). Two concerns prompted the development of the present…

Understanding the nature of olfactory abnormalities is crucial for optimal interventions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, previous studies that have investigated odor identification in children with ASD have produced inconsistent results. The ability to correctly identify an odor relies heavily on visual inputs in the…

In this paper, we describe an experiment that compared the use of a Tangible User Interface (physical objects augmented with digital information) and a set of Contrasting Cases as a preparation for future learning. We carried out an experiment (N = 40) with a 2 × 2 design: the first factor compared traditional instruction ("Tell &…

The present study investigated whether and how fast young children can use information encoded in morphological markers during real-time event representation. Using the visual world paradigm, we tested 35 adults, 34 5-year-olds and 33 3-year-olds. The results showed that the adults, the 5-year-olds and the 3-year-olds all exhibited eye gaze…

In this paper the authors conducted a comprehensive study on English abstract writing style. Abstraction is the process of forming a theoretical concept based on the observation and classification of object things. This concept has no definite denotation. However in specific situation it can be clearly understood. In English, writing an abstract…

Understanding another's actions, including what they are doing and why they are doing it, can be difficult for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This understanding is supported by the action observation (AON) and mentalizing (MZN) networks, as well as the superior temporal sulcus. We examined these areas in children with ASD and…

Reflection in action research is a complicated matter because of the many domains of reflection and most significantly, the lack of understanding of these domains of reflection in action research and how these are supported. In this paper, we propose a framework based on four domains of reflection, namely, scientific, artistic, moral and technical…

This study compared how adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) evaluated unfamiliar peers (i.e., perceptions), as well as how adolescents believed they were evaluated by peers (i.e., metaperceptions). The Perceptions and Metaperceptions Questionnaire was designed to quantify perceptions and metaperceptions following a live…

Visual attention of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed using a change blindness paradigm. Twenty-five adolescents with ASD aged 12-18 years and 25 matched typically developing (TD) adolescents viewed 36 pairs of digitized real-world images. Each pair of images was displayed in a "flicker paradigm" whereby a…

This paper arises from a study of how concepts related to understanding functions develop for students across the years of secondary/high school, using small samples from two different curricula systems: England and Israel. We used a survey consisting of function tasks developed in collaboration with teachers from both curriculum systems. We…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often emit errors during the establishment of conditional discriminations. These children may not respond to more traditional error-correction procedures, such as least-to-most prompting. In this study, we compared two other types of error-correction procedures, namely embedding an identity-matching…

This article presents a new score generation algorithm to compute the accuracy of student concept maps in comparison to teacher maps. The algorithm follows a "compare and remove" method to remove the extra vertices and wrong edges of student concept map with respect to teacher map. A group of 230 students were taken to generate student…

Diffusion-based item response theory models for responses and response times in tests have attracted increased attention recently in psychometrics. Analyzing response time data, however, is delicate as response times are often contaminated by unusual observations. This can have serious effects on the validity of statistical inference. In this…