UMass Lowell Rocio Rosales Adrien Bisson for UMass Lowell

 Lasell University and UMass Lowell today announced a joint venture designed to diversify the pipeline of students pursuing careers in special education and applied behavior analysis.

With a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Lasell and UMass Lowell faculty will develop an interdisciplinary graduate level program that will prepare professionals to meet the special educational needs of school-aged students (K-8) with autism spectrum disorder and related disabilities.  

As part of the grant, full scholarships will be awarded to a cohort of 24 graduate students. Twelve participants representing each institution will enter the program beginning in Fall 2022.

Planning and curriculum development are currently underway. The availability of scholarships will allow graduate students to continue their training, preparing them to work with the rising number of children with a variety of behavior needs.

The master’s program will encourage the next generation of educators to work in concert to support children in grades K-8 by introducing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to special education and applied behavior analysis while integrating culturally responsive methodologies to address the needs of a growingly diverse student population.  Together, Lasell and UMass Lowell graduate students will attend coordinated seminars and workshops that promote best practices and reinforce collaboration and problem-solving.

This new initiative is a natural extension of the Pathways to Teacher Diversity (PTD) program established at Lasell in 2015 by Professor Claudia Rinaldi who chairs the Newton-based university’s education department. PTD mentors undergraduate students representing diverse backgrounds and experiences, encouraging them to contemplate careers as educators in their local communities. This spring, the first cohort of undergraduates will complete the program. Since its launch, the PTD program has been a catalyst, bringing culturally and linguistically diverse students to the teaching profession.  In the last five years alone, PTD has increased the diversity among its participants from 3% to 22% in the teacher preparation program. 

“Schools here and across the country have grown increasingly more diverse, yet the educator workforce does not reflect this evolution within our communities,” said Rinaldi. “Today, in the U.S, as many as 87% of all teachers are white. The more students see and hear themselves, their cultures, and languages in the classroom, the more likely they are to experience academic success and pursue teaching as a career.”

For the past six years, Lasell has partnered with 11 Massachusetts district high schools in Boston, Lawrence, Martha’s Vineyard, Milford, and Marlborough among others, to engage students considering careers in education.

“Under the PTD model, we pair Lasell undergrad education mentors with high school students through in-person sessions on campus, at the participating high schools and via online experiences,” said Rinaldi. “The partnership with UMass Lowell is the logical next step in our efforts to bring new cross discipline and cultural responsiveness, real-life teacher preparation to special education.”

In addition to Rinaldi, the team behind this new alliance includes faculty from both schools who are experts in special education, applied behavior analysis, key public schools and nonprofit autism service organizations. UMass Lowell faculty Robai Werunga, School of Education assistant professor, whose work focuses on special education and early intervention, and Psychology Associate Prof. Rocio Rosales, program coordinator, Applied Behavior Analysis and Autism Studies, are partnering with Rinaldi in leading this endeavor.

Though the demand for qualified educators is high, numerous factors have resulted in a shortage of teachers, including a sharp decline in the number of high school graduates enrolling in college-level teacher preparation programs. Further, while children of color represent 51% of all students in the United States, only 13% of teachers represent diverse backgrounds. And locally, the disparity within the special education sector is even more significant, with only 8% of special education teachers in Massachusetts identifying as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC.)

Between 2019 and 2020 alone, 7.3 million or 14% of American public school students ages 3 to 21 who were diagnosed with a variety of challenges including learning disabilities, hearing, vision, speech, and language impairments, emotional, behavioral and autism spectrum disorders, developmental delays and traumatic brain injuries received no-cost special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Lasell University on this new initiative to provide interdisciplinary training to graduate students in the Applied Behavior Analysis and Autism Studies program at UMass Lowell,” said Rosales. “Our graduate program has always embraced a collaborative training model by exposing students to a wide range of perspectives within the field of psychology. Adding a focus in special education is a natural fit since our graduate students regularly work with children who receive educational services in public and specialized school settings. This new program will also help us respond to the clear need to diversify the workforce to best meet the needs of families of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.”

“The number of students with autism who enter high school settings continues to grow,” says FPG’s Veronica P. Fleury. “Many educators may find that they’re not prepared to adapt their instruction to meet state standards and the diverse needs of these students.”

Scientists at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) report that high school students with autism can learn under Common Core State Standards (CCSS), boosting their prospects for college and employment. Newly published recommendations from FPG’s team also provide strategies for educating adolescents with autism under a CCSS curriculum.

“The number of students with autism who enter high school settings continues to grow,” said Veronica P. Fleury, lead author and postdoctoral research associate with FPG’s Center on Secondary Education for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders. “Many educators may find that they’re not prepared to adapt their instruction to meet both state standards and the diverse needs of these students.”

In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the CCSS for English and mathematics in an effort to better prepare students for college and careers. According to Fleury, the greater demand for a technologically advanced workforce also makes academic skills now even more essential for high school graduates.

“But the college enrollment of people with autism is among the lowest for all categories of disabilities,” Fleury said. “In addition, less than 40% of the population with autism is employed—and most of those with jobs only work part-time, without benefits.”

However, she said that academic performance in high school plays an important role in opportunities for a college education and employment. Yet, while the CCSS outlines expectations of what educators should teach, it provides no guidance on how to teach these skills to students with or without autism.

Fleury believes the most effective high school instruction requires understanding the complex profile of students with ASD, who possess both strengths and weaknesses.

People with autism have some social deficits and may process language at a slower rate, she said, while many also have enhanced visual processing. Some may have difficulty learning to make calculations, but others are mathematically gifted.

“It’s extremely hard to draw general conclusions about academic performance for these students,” Fleury said. “But adolescents with autism often do have difficulties comprehending texts, and many find writing a burdensome task.”

Fluery added that work in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) are replacing manufacturing jobs and may provide viable opportunities for many people with ASD. She said people with autism often gravitate to these fields in college, highlighting the need to equip them as high school students with skills that will enable them to compete and achieve.

“While the very structure of high school poses challenges for students with autism, being able to anticipate and understand activities, schedules, and expectations can improve their ability to respond to classroom demands,” she said. “Establishing routines and creating written schedules also helps.”

In a new article in Remedial and Special Education, Fleury and her co-authors recommended several strategies to educate students with ASD effectively, including exposing them to assignments before presenting the work in class. The researchers also noted a variety of techniques for delivering the highly explicit instruction that teenagers with autism require, such as teaching mnemonic devices for remembering steps in a task.

“High school students with ASD also need ample opportunities to practice skills across settings throughout the school day,” she said. “And teaching them to monitor their own behavior can help them to use their skills in a variety of settings.”

Fleury added that because there is a strong link between social and academic skills, new research should focus on developing interventions for students with autism that can address both areas of need together.

“We know that when students with autism receive appropriate instruction and supports, many of them are capable of learning academic content that is aligned with state standards,” she said. “And better academic performance often leads to a more successful outcome after high school.”

North Carolina State University researchers found that a four-week training course made a substantial difference in helping special education teachers anticipate different ways students with learning disabilities might solve math problems. The findings suggest that the training would help instructors more quickly identify and respond to a student’s needs.

Published in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, researchers say their findings could help teachers in special education develop strategies to respond to kids’ math reasoning and questions in advance. They also say the findings point to the importance of mathematics education preparation for special education teachers – an area where researchers say opportunities are lacking.

“Many special education programs do not include a focus on mathematics for students with disabilities, and few, if any, focus on understanding the mathematical thinking of students with disabilities in particular,” said the study’s first author Jessica Hunt, associate professor of mathematics education and special education at NC State. “This study was based on a course experience designed to do just that – to heighten teacher knowledge of the mathematical thinking of students with learning disabilities grounded in a stance of neurodiversity.”

In the study, researchers evaluated the impact of a four-week course on 20 pre-service special education teachers. Researchers wanted to know if the course impacted the educators’ ability to anticipate the mathematical reasoning of students with learning disabilities, and help teachers adjust tasks to make them more accessible. The course also emphasized neurodiversity, which defines cognitive differences as a natural and beneficial outgrowth of neurological and biological diversity.

“Neurodiversity says that all human brains are highly variable, with no average or ‘normal’ learners,” Hunt said. “This means that we all have strengths and challenges, and as humans we use what makes sense to us to understand the world. It’s a way to challenge pervasive deficit approaches to looking at disability, and to instead use an asset-based approach that positions students with learning disabilities as mathematically capable.”

Before and after the course, the teachers took a 40-question assessment. In the test, researchers asked teachers to use words, pictures or symbols to describe a strategy that elementary school students with learning disabilities might use to solve a problem. They compared teachers’ responses to see how well they anticipated students’ thinking, and also how they might modify tasks for students.

After the course, they saw more anticipation of what they called “implicit action,” which is using strategies like counting, halving, grouping, or predicting the number of people sharing a certain item to solve a problem. It’s often represented by pictures or words. Before the test, many teachers used “static representations” in which they used mathematical expressions to show solutions. While static representations are abstract representations of solutions, researchers argued implicit actions can reflect how students with learning disabilities themselves might work through a problem.

They found teachers’ use of implicit action increased from 32 percent to 82 percent of answers before and after the test, while static representation decreased from 50 percent of answers to 17 percent. Their responses didn’t add up to 100 percent because some teachers left some answers blank.

“The course helped teachers move from a top-down, one-size-fits-all view of ‘this is how you solve these problems,’ to an anticipation of how actual students who are learning these concepts for the first time might think through these problems,” Hunt said. “That’s a very different stance in terms of educating teachers to anticipate student thinking so they can meet it with responsive instruction.”

Researchers also tracked how teachers modified math problems to make them more accessible to students before and after taking the course. After participating in the course, researchers saw that more teachers changed the problem type. They saw a shift in 50 percent of answers.

“The benefit of anticipating students’ thinking is to help teachers to be responsive and support students’ prior knowledge as they’re teaching, which is a really hard thing to do,” Hunt said. “It’s even harder if you don’t yet appreciate what that thinking could be.”

Negative school experiences can have harmful long term effects on pupils with Autism Spectrum Conditions, a new study in the journal Autism reports.

Researchers from the University of Surrey have discovered that experiences of social and emotional exclusion in mainstream schools can adversely affect how pupils with autism view themselves, increasing their risk of developing low self-esteem, a poor sense of self-worth and mental health problems.

Examining 17 previous studies in the area, researchers discovered that how pupils with autism view themselves is closely linked to their perceptions of how other’s treat and interact with them. They found that a tendency of many pupils with the condition to internalise the negative attitudes and reactions of others toward them, combined with unfavourable social comparisons to classmates, leads to a sense of being ‘different’ and more limited than peers.

Negative self-perception can lead to increased isolation and low self-esteem making pupils with autism more susceptible to mental health problems.

It was discovered that the physical environment of schools can impact on children’s ability to interact with other pupils. Sensory sensitivity, which is a common characteristic of autism and can magnify sounds to an intolerable level, can lead to everyday classroom and playground noises such as shrieks and chatter being a source of anxiety and distraction. This impacts on a pupil’s ability to concentrate in the classroom and to socialise with others, further increasing isolation and a sense of being ‘different.’

It was also found that pupils with autism who developed supportive friendships and felt accepted by classmates said this helped alleviate their social difficulties and made them feel good about themselves.

These findings suggest it is crucial for schools to create a culture of acceptance for all pupils to ensure the long term wellbeing of pupils with autism in mainstream settings.

Lead author of the paper Dr Emma Williams, from the University of Surrey, said: “Inclusive mainstream education settings may inadvertently accentuate the sense of being ‘different’ in a negative way to classmates.

“We are not saying that mainstream schools are ‘bad’ for pupils with autism, as other evidence suggests they have a number of positive effects, including increasing academic performance and social skills.

“Rather, we are suggesting that by cultivating a culture of acceptance of all and making small changes, such as creating non-distracting places to socialise, and listening to their pupils’ needs, schools can help these pupils think and feel more positively about themselves.

“With over 100,000 children in the UK diagnosed with autism, it is important that we get this right to ensure that pupils with autism get the education they deserve and leave school feeling accepted, loved and valued, rather than with additional mental health issues”.

A report investigating the educational needs of students with autism has identified social and emotional needs as the top priority to ensure success at school.

The Australian Educational Needs Analysis report was released at the ASPECT Autism in education conference in Melbourne’s Convention & Exhbition Centre on Friday May 6.

With an increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with autism in the past 10 years, the report indicated a high rate of exclusion with social and academic needs not often understood or supported.

The landmark two-year study, commissioned by Autism CRC, surveyed 1500 people including teachers, other school staff, students on the spectrum along with their parents and carers across Australia.

Led by QUT’s Faculty of Education Dr Beth Saggers and Professor Suzanne Carrington, the research found teachers needed more support to provide inclusive classrooms.

“A one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with autistic children is not effective,” Professor Carrington said.

“Autism is just one area of diversity and the research demonstrated the need for schools to be flexible and agile to children’s needs and often other students also benefit.”

Dr Saggers said the research also highlighted issues and obstacles children faced during their schooling years but also emphasized the difficulties teachers experienced in trying to successfully meet their needs.

“Parents, educators, students and specialists surveyed overwhelmingly indicated social emotional wellbeing as an essential element in the successful schooling for autistic children,” she said.

“Autistic children vary in their intellectual abilities and may find it difficult to plan and organize their time, cope with change, manage the social context of the school environment and at times stay calm and regulate their emotions.

“By promoting social competence and social emotional wellbeing, providing positive behavior support, assisting with planning and organizing, using technology, the individual needs of a child with autism can be addressed.

“This helps to positively influence their participation and engagement within the classroom environment.”