Schools at the centre of educational research in autism: Possibilities,practices and promises

A challenge for current intervention developers is the transfer of positive interventions into everyday school settings. Most efficacy studies continue to be tested in controlled laboratory or clinical settings and very rarely in schools where children spend most of their time. We have limited knowledge of how laboratory-based studies would fare in a school setting, or whether studies that are tested first in schools can be sustained in these settings. The goal of increasing school-based intervention studies for children with an autism spectrum disorder was the primary aim of a special session at the 2011 International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) conference, ¹ a meeting that led directly to this special issue. The meeting reflected a growing awareness in the autism field that there remains a substantial gap between research and practice in real-world classrooms (Reichow et al., 2008) and a considerable lack of involvement from teachers and practitioners in intervention research generally (Parsons et al., 2011). Beyond the obvious advantages of implementing effective interventions into the school settings where children spend their time, thus increasing the likely exposure to any given intervention, schools also offer great diversity. Schools may be the perfect laboratory as nearly all children go to school; therefore, conducting research in school settings can increase research samples of children to include those who are traditionally underserved, under-represented and under-resourced.

A further impetus for the special issue was to address what is often the ending of the discussion section of many autism intervention studies, that is, the expected future focus on translating the intervention into the community school setting. We argue that the time is now to make these promises a reality. We must make inroads on the transfer of effective interventions to school settings and to raise the bar for the development of interventions to be school ready; this includes the possibility that interventions can be collaboratively developed and defined between research teams and schools.

Experience reveals that working in the school setting is not for the faint of heart. There are many aspects of the day that one cannot control and which need to be better understood. These issues are discussed in the article by Kasari and Smith, who outline the methodological barriers that exist in autism research and limit the uptake and implementation of evidence-based practices in real-world classrooms. Importantly, the authors also make suggestions for overcoming these, including a need to be more flexible in the implementation of research approaches and to provide more opportunities for collaboration between communities, educational professionals and researchers. Parsons and colleagues demonstrate how this can be done in their example from the United Kingdom, outlining the successes and further potential of a school-research partnership as well as the challenge of sustainability for work that could offer valuable insights but remains largely unfunded. Crucially, teachers are included as co-authors of this article, emphasizing the importance of hearing their perspectives as well as ensuring that collaboration extends beyond just the implementation of research.

Alongside these two conceptual articles, a range of empirical studies are included to showcase the depth and scope of research that can be carried out in schools. Mandell and colleagues present a rare example of a randomized controlled trial comparing the effectiveness of two different educational interventions implemented by teachers in classrooms in the United States. The results highlight a crucial issue in bringing interventions to scale in school settings; overall, clinically significant gains were made in both intervention groups despite relatively low fidelity to programme implementation, thereby raising important questions about teacher effectiveness more widely as well as how programme fidelity is assessed in research. Pellicano and colleagues demonstrate the value of taking a mixed and multi-method approach to exploring the nature of children’s friendships within mainstream (general) schools in the United Kingdom. Their research shows that even with relatively small samples of children, it is possible to gain a rich, and more nuanced, picture of what friendship means to children with autism, and it remains important not to apply normative assumptions to this.

Bauminger-Zviely and colleagues also focus on social interactions, but this time through the application of a novel collaborative technology for supporting pairs of children on the autism spectrum to work and talk together on a range of problem-solving tasks. Given the continuing rapid developments in technology, and their use in our classrooms, it is important to include an example of how cutting-edge ideas can be implemented in schools, with successful outcomes. Finally, two studies demonstrate how teachers can learn new teaching strategies to promote significant learning gains in their students. Wong and colleagues taught teachers strategies to increase joint attention and play abilities, making good on the promise to take a laboratory-based efficacious intervention (Kasari et al., 2006) to an authentic community school setting. Wong et al. found similar effects of the intervention on student behaviour in just a brief amount of time (after 4 weeks). Mucchetti highlights the value of teacher-led shared reading with minimally verbal children with autism, who tend to be under-represented in research. Her study showed that the four children involved could be supported to engage meaningfully in literacy activities, following only a short (30-minute) training period with the teachers. This short training period, coupled with the simplicity of the reading adaptations, make this a very promising approach for implementation in school classrooms. Thus, both teacher-implemented interventions (Wong et al.; Mucchetti) demonstrate promise in making an impact on classroom instruction to improve specific learning outcomes in short periods of time.

The articles in this special issue provide some inspiration and hope for the future. Inspiration can be found in the range of methodological approaches used and the targets of the interventions. We hope that in the future, more interventions will be aimed directly on the understudied context of the school. Indeed, with this inspiration and hope, also comes responsibility. Researchers must take more responsibility in raising the bar with our expectations of what is possible and needed in the community so as to improve outcomes for all children, and not just those who are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to participate in a clinical trial.