What are challenges students with ASD may experience in a classroom environment?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Students with ASD may experience difficulties in the following three areas:
• Social interaction: Students with ASD might have difficulty with nonverbal behavior (displaying or interpreting), seldom engage in eye-to-eye contact with the teacher or with peers, and show little interest in small-group or collaborative work.Similarly, meaningful social interactions such as taking turns, asking and responding to questions, and understanding non-literal ideas or actions are challenging.Often, students with ASD will need a lot of prompting and visual cues to achieve successful social interaction in the classroom.Students with ASD might have trouble contributing to a conversation while others can have a single-minded conversational focus and have trouble allowing a conversational partner to get a word in edgewise.
• Routines and insistence on sameness: A core characteristic of ASD is a preoccupation with restricted and repetitive behaviors or a focus on particular objects.Students with ASD may have obsessions, repetitive behaviors, and routines that we should seek to understand and be prepared to intervene appropriately. Even minor changes such as moving between two activities can be painful or anxiety-producing for some.Unexpected changes are most difficult to deal with. Many times such changes can lead to anxiety or behavioral outbursts.
• Sensory processing difficulties: There is a direct link between atypical sensory processing and behavioral and emotional problems, which can manifest in the classroom. Children with ASD, who have difficulty tuning into verbal instructions in the presence of background noise, are more likely to underachieve academically.