Academic difficulties with autism

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First of all, this is not a personal question. This question is not a "what are your personal difficulties with academics?" You are free to tell me if you want, but I am really just asking in general:

What are usual, common academic difficulties people with high functioning autism tend to experience? (Yes, I know not all share the same ones...I am just looking for general information of what a child or an adult with autism might have difficulty with due to their autism alone.)

When I studied math I was always criticized for not being able to memorize mathematical formulas but I never got any credit for inventing new mathematical formulas.

I've been reading books on autism and aspergers that I signed out from the psychology section of my university's library. One of them said arithmetic can be very easy for a person with autism, while mathemathics can be very difficult. I always thought they were one and the same, but they are not. I was always so good at math in elementary school because it was arithmetic. When I got to junior high and high school I spent many nights crying over my math homework which I could not make any sense of no matter how long I stared at it. That was because we had moved beyond arithmetic and into the abstract world of more advanced mathematics.

Well... I can think of the obvious ones...

The change of routine when starting.

Sensory overload.

Misunderstanding the teacher.

Possible issues with other students.

Not being able to focus on subjects that you aren't interested in.

Writing was a problem for me. I couldn't use written language to express my thoughts effectively. The concepts and pictures did not connect with the words. This would cause problems in most classes, but especially essay writing in English. The solution that I used was to make a list of essay ideas that could be applied to any work of literature and write "form essays" for them. Then, when I had to write an essay in class, I would just regurgitate the form essay. I tricked the English teachers every time. They wrote "Brilliant!" and "Amazing!" on my form essays, because my form essays always analyzed the literature in an unusual way. I would always laugh and think, "Hahaha, suckers, that was Form Essay #17."

Last year, I developed spontaneous writing skills out of the blue. I was 29. I don't know how it happened. Prior, pidgin. Pidgin good. Good write pidgin.

Well, this is all true to some extent.



Actually, for me, it's the other way around. I'm not that good at arithmetic, but math is easy to me. All of the mistakes I make are not from a lack of understanding of the content, but simple things like 3 + 2 = 6, or -3 - 4 = -1



Me too. I really suck at writing, but I have learned that a little pile of BS goes a long way.

Same here, except I hit my "abstraction ceiling" sometime in college when trying to visualize multivariate integration for complex functions, and applying green's theorem and variants thereof. I was really sailing until hitting the last few chapters in multivariate calculus.

Last edited by swbluto on 04 Jun 2011, 7:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

Does that have an English translation? Subtitles maybe?... no?...

lol...

Presentations... terrifying at first.

I'd say the fact that people with autism learn and process information so differently to the majority is a problem because it can mean that schooling doesn't suit us very well and we may fall behind or get low grades when, with the right methods of teaching (and some freedom to learn) in place, we could do extremely well. In other words, the ways in which most people are taught in school often doesn't suit us very well.

Then sensory sensitivity can cause distractions and stress, and stress makes learning more difficult as we find ourselves wanting to shut out input. Reacting to our environment too much takes up more thinking space and energy and gets in the way of giving that attention to the things we should be learning.

Also, social difficulties can cause trouble. Not being good at communication means it can be difficult to communicate one's intelligence, giving an impression of lower intelligence or lower aptitude at certain subjects, when in fact that person could be very bright and extremely good at those subjects. Misunderstandings can lead to wrong answers in homework, and inability to understand vague instructions can cause the person to do too much or little work or even give up in a state of panic and frustration at trying to understand what was assigned.

Despite that math is the universal language, its knowledge exceeds the operational limits of mere written language, so its translation has a long history of frustrated teachers and authors writing 400+ page tomes that dust and spiders claim home to in the desolate recesses of the University library. But I'll try...

"Ditto, except it got really hard sometime in college when trying to doing the sum of the infinitesimal rectangular prisms that comprised a given solid to find the volume and figuring out how to do said sum by visualizing the shape from the mathematical equations, and it also got hard when trying to understand the utility of those funky line integral theorems when the shapes themselves didn't seem well-defined at all. Gee, I was really sailing until hitting the last part of Calculus 4."

The only thing I found difficult at primary school was reading on demand, even though I had been a precocious reader (from 3 1/2 yrs). For example, each week, the teacher would bring out a box full of cards, each of which had a story (a variety of fact and fiction) and questions about the passage and its grammar. I think we had a mximum of 15 minutes to complete one and then move on to another. I couldn't concentrate on the passage (I was looking at the time passing and others going up for another card and getting stressed by that) and seldom ever finished the questions in the timescale. Also, I hear each word in my head, in my voice and then convert it into a sort of visual image - so I'm a slow reader. As a result, I was stuck at the bottom levels for the full year, much to the dismay of the teacher. I was one of the smartest in the class (there were 4 of us who were about equal and way ahead of everyone else) and she couldn't understand my difficulty. I sailed through high school, but struggled with maths at a higher level (trigonometry, calculus, etc), although arithmetic, algebra, etc are very much second nature to me - just as littlelily says.

I agree - I really like formulas, but have difficulty with arithmatic

I have difficulty finding emotions in poems (but, I manage to fool the teacher by rewording and reapplying the things he says without actually 'understanding' the literature) so where possible I try to avoid that topic and look at 'social/political impacts', for example.

I have difficulty writing legibly and summarising what people are saying (note taking) and concentrating on what the person is saying as well as writing although that is somewhat linked to my hearing loss.

Vague instructions are a nightmare for me and I'm not very good at prioritising so I stressed if I have to work out what order to do something in.

And, different learning styles. I've never been very good with group work, and I learn best through reading material so anything given orally I may remember but it's unlikely that I would remember anything I might be asked to draw. Although, many autistics learn better through pictures, so they may have difficulties orally given classes, perhaps?

Oral presentations and group work. I either totally avoided it or I just tried to do all the work by myself. I don't enjoy working on something with other people. I also hated the new type of "problem-based learning-PBL" approaches advocated in many professional faculties (medicine, pharmacy, etc.). I think it was because I couldn't learn that way. Too little structure and it really hi-lites my weakness in practical/real world skills, multi-tasking and social interaction difficulties. Having said, the difficulties there foreshadowed my difficulties in the working environment.

"PBL was pioneered in the health sciences at McMaster University in the late 1960's and subsequently it has been adopted by other medical school programs (Barrows, 1996) and also been adapted for undergraduate instruction (Boud and Feletti, 1997; Duch et al., 2001; Amador et al., 2006). The use of PBL, like other student-centered pedagogies, has been motivated by recognition of the failures of traditional instruction (Wingspread, 1994; Boyer, 1998) and the emergence of deeper understandings of how people learn (National Research Council, 2000). Unlike traditional instruction, PBL actively engages the student in constructing knowledge in their own mind by themselves, and thus addresses many of deficits of traditional classroom where knowledge is expounded by an instructor.

Characteristics of PBL are:

Learning is driven by challenging, open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problems.
Students generally work in collaborative groups.
Teachers take on the role as "facilitators" of learning.

In PBL, students are encouraged to take responsibility for their group and organize and direct the learning process with support from a tutor or instructor. Advocates of PBL claim it can be used to enhance content knowledge while simultaneously fostering the development of communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning skills. PBL may position students in a simulated real world working and professional context which involves policy, process, and ethical problems that will need to be understood and resolved to some outcome. By working through a combination of learning strategies to discover the nature of a problem, understanding the constraints and options to its resolution, defining the input variables, and understanding the viewpoints involved, students learn to negotiate the complex sociological nature of the problem and how competing resolutions may inform decision-making."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning

Last edited by Kon on 04 Jun 2011, 10:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

Some things I've read say that it's common for autistic people to have difficulty summarizing. I do have difficulty summarizing, and that has been an academic frustration for me, although I have generally found ways to deal with assignments that require summarizing.