My AS teen cannot understand what she reads!! !! Help!! !

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I am about to go into my AS daughter's school and throw a fit. She entered a new (public) school in September. I met with her entire "team" and expressed my concern that she cannot understand literature, cannot infer meanings, cannot generalize from what she reads. I was repeatedly assured that she was making progress, getting special help, etc. etc.

She did not do well in English.

This semester, for some reason I cannot fathom, she is not even taking English!! ! BUT, she is taking Psychology and again, she does not understand what she reads. She has failed two exams and does not even know how to ask for help. I have spent three hours with her today going over material. She does not understand it from reading, but it is possible, with a great deal of effort, to get the concepts through to her. I have no idea if she will still "get" them tomorrow.

I have read many, many books about AS and I have not seen a description of this particular problem. I have no idea how to help her, where to look for expertise, but this problem HAS TO be addressed or my daughter will have no career. She is smart, but very handicapped in this particular area.

I need to add that this is not just a reading issue. She has the same problems with movies; she does not understand stories that require the viewer to infer anything that is not spelled out quite literally. She gets very frustrated and "bored" with stories that require one to infer motivations, feelings, etc.

Does anyone know what I mean when I describe this? Can you point me to any resources for tackling this problem?

Thanks in advance!! !

Hello. This is some information from a seminar I attended last year. Professor Tony Attwood - Asperger's guru - presented the conference.

In 2006, Tony Attwood surveyed 238 children and adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome at his clinic.

Results showed:
• Problems with organizational skills 81%
• Short term memory problems 59%
• Planning problems 78%
• Time management problems 80%
• Impulsive 59%

These are genuine difficulties with a neurobiological basis.

Children with Asperger’s Syndrome have difficulties with Executive Function. They have difficulties with the following:
• Organizational and planning abilities
• Working memory
• Inhibition and impulse control
• Self-reflection and self-monitoring
• Time management and prioritizing
• Understanding complex or abstract concepts
• Using new strategies

Or as Tony Attwood put it, many children with Asperger’s Syndrome “couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery!”

Tony Attwood reported children and adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome need an ‘Executive Secretary’ especially in High School.

The role of Executive Secretary is usually performed by the mother. The Executive Secretary needs to maintain ongoing contact with the High School. The student Asperger’s Syndrome will need help with time management to ensure they complete assignments and projects on time.

Tony Attwood reported at least 75% of children with Asperger’s syndrome also have a profile indicative of Attention Deficit Disorder.

The four components of attention include:
• The ability to sustain attention
• Pay attention to relevant information
• Shift attention when needed
• Encode attention – to remember what was attended to

Strategies to assist with attention difficulties include:
• Relevant information should be highlighted
• Assignments should be broken down into smaller units, in keeping with the child’s attention span
• The teacher should regularly monitor and give feedback to maintain attention
• The amount of environmental distractions should be reduced
• A quiet, isolated work space should be provided


Hope this helps.
Helen

Thank you Helen!

I have both of Tony A's books and am well acquainted with executive function issues, especially since I myself have ADD. Many of the suggestions you outline have, indeed, been useful, and we do have assignments broken down into digestible parts. My daughter gets extra time to do assignments and her homework time is limited.

I do not think this is primarily an attention/organization issue. It has something to do with my daughter's inability/difficulty with concepts and abstract ideas. She learns by rote and does not seem capable of drawing her own conclusions from what she has learned. It is some permutation of the literalness of ASpies.

I understand enough about AS to know what the problem is, but I have no idea what methods would help her to master this kind of material. She cannot learn fact A and fact B and come up with concept C.

It is interesting to me that my AS kids ( I have two ) are so very different in this regard. My son is the most brilliant abstract thinker I have ever met.


I hope I've made my question clearer. It's been a very long day!

It is connected to the AS tendency to interpret things very literally, take them at face value and look no further. The thing I would ask is can she remember what she reads? I can remember an entire story, but if someone asks me to connect that story to an abstract thought, I can't do it.

Aesop's Fables helped me a lot when I was younger. They tell a story, then state (in plain english) the moral.

I have this issue. I will always have this issue. I managed B's and C's throughout High School English. I made sure that I read the material. I made sure that I participated in class as much as humanly possible. I used my ability to memorize specific facts to get through multiple choice questions on tests. I bombed essay questions that asked for evaluation of the book, unless we had actually done the eval in class and I had written it down in my notes. If they tell me flat out what the connetion is, I have it, it gets added to my database for future use.

The one thing that never helped me: trying to get me to reason out the connection. It just doesn't work. I never saw the point. If someone who is trying to help me sees the connection, they can just tell me, and I'll go "oh, really?" and then I can work it backwards to connect this action to that action to the starting action. Then I get it.

This problem actually got me in trouble with an accounting teacher in college. She gave us a project. The terms were clear cut, specific, short and to the point. I took the project at it's face value, did it exactly like the project paper said to. Failed the project. I talked to some of her other students and they told me that the teacher expected/wanted people to ask questions. Well I didn't see anything to ask questions about, so I didn't.

EDITED TO ADD:
I also learn Kinetically. I have to actually do something to get it down.

Think of the AS brain like a database. It has to have a certain number of A's and B's adding up to C's in order for the A + B = C to become standard response. The problem here with school is that they move quickly through a varied amount of material. Then go back over it in a little more depth in the next year. And again in the next year. It just doesn't work as well for the AS brain that wants to stick deeply to only one or two subjects for 2 years. Then move on.

Try connect the dots... or math equations with her psych work... on paper.... write down a bunch of symptoms..... or the pieces of whichever puzzle she is trying to figure out... you can cut them out or make them different cards and build diagrams that she can actually interact with, move to make different Dx's... something that isn't just staring at the book and getting frustrated... something to focus her hands/eyes on and let her brain process...

How old is your daughter and what grade is she in? We learned in autism literature very early on that my son would be challenged with reading comprehension. We started teaching him to read before he was in school and we have since tutored him in reading comprehension with workbooks and discussion. I still read to him at bedtime.
He's above grade level with reading ability, but just under grade level with comprehension. It also affects his ability to write and express his understanding.

I read this thread with interest because, as a 28-year-old with AS, I have been dealing with somewhat similar problems throughout my whole educational experience. Abstract thinking has always come naturally to me, but I do have problems with executive function, attention and short-term memory.

These problems disappear when I am working on something that interests me. For example, I can easily write 100 pages about reptiles in one day, without stopping. But I struggle to read a single paragraph about law, and when I do, I do not remember any of it. Over the years, I have improved my performance in school by trying to relate the subject matter to my interests. This has made a dramatic difference.

Does your daughter have any special interests or obsessions? Have you suggested this technique? I don't know if it would help with abstract thinking, but it might help with attention and memory.

I have similar troubles with inferring meanings.
I read Orwell's Animal Farm and if I didn't read the prefaces and hear other people talking about it I would never have thought that it was talking about the communist ideas and problems of them. I just liked the funny story of the pigs who took over the farm and ultimately were indistinguishable from the humans.

I had a friend who watched the film The Lost Boys and wrote a paper that talked about how it involved homosexuality over a dozen times in the film. I watched and saw a retro vampire gang film. I got a bit of an inkling that the vampire gang are not quite normal, but then they are vampires so I would expect them to be unnormal.

If anyone has any ideas on exercises that can be done or books to read I would also love to learn how to do this.

My son finds everything much easier if the text is read to him.

Trying to both read and understand at the same time is part of the problem.
Only having to try to understand is much easier.

He also does not like reading fiction. When asked to read aloud he will read beautifully but not understand most of it.

He is a big fan of audio books when it comes to fiction. (Thanks Bit Torrent)

Reading history or natural history books seems to be no problem.

But then, those are special interests and the ideas are not difficult. Mainly a lot of facts.

Sticking with subjects that interest her may be the best hope. That and and maybe reading some of the text for her.
Thrilling, I know

is it possible to have your daughter use a small tape recorder to record lectures instead of reading the material?....Some of us grasp concepts better if they're spoken vs. written

Wow! Thank you all so much for your responses. They have really been helpful.

When my daughter was only 6 years old, she was dx'ed (in addition to the AS) as hyperlexic. This means that her active vocabulary (the words she can use) was AHEAD of her passive vocabulary ( the words she understands). This is an unusual condition and "fools" a lot of people into thinking she understands more than she does. I remember her meeting a male friend of mine when she was in 2nd grade. She looked at him and said "I am smitten." It was an amusing and contentually appropriate remark, but when I asked her what she meant, she had no idea.

I think the key, as was stated a few times here, is to tap into her interests. She seems to be a "sequential perseverator" and her interests change over time. I see how these interests can help her learn. She was once quite obsessed with the movie "The Wizard of Oz" and memorized it in several languages. She researched all the actors and could tell you how and when they died and of what. She knows which munchkins are still alive (I think there is one). When her history class this year studied the political symbolism in the Wizard of Oz, she wrote a great paper because it interested her.

Other than going to a very special school, how can one negotiate higher education studying only what is of interest? Or is there a way to tie interests in to any subject if only I (or a teacher) is clever enough to figure it out?

I have yet to figure out whether my daughter learns best through visual, auditory or kinesthetic input. I know that auditory is quite important to her, so yes, I will find out whether or not she can audio tape the class and learn that way.

Again, thanks to everyone who responded!

I hated English, I did horrible...that whole literature stuff blew me away...I could never understand how ANYONE could understand ANY of it...Well, I hardly read because honestly, I didn't capture most of it...so I would have to just start reading the same darn page every single day because I couldn't remember what I read...years have passed and I love reading now...it was not until I started reading things that "I" liked, that I began getting it...I think it came with practice because since I really wanted to learn about the subject, I focused more...Now, I'm pretty good...although I can tell you that if something doesn't really interest me, and I read it, I won't remember in 2 minutes what the heck I read...

Again, it seems I'm the odd one out. I loved English and foreign languages. Reading was always a strength for me. My problem is that I seem to do incredibly stupid, bonehead things. How could someone who did well academically and can read, remember and understand a large volume of written material be so dumb when it comes to little things?