Judi Randi

Teaching Children with Autism to Read for Meaning: Challenges and Possibilities

The purpose of this literature review is to examine what makes reading for understanding especially challenging for children on the autism spectrum, most of whom are skilled at decoding and less skilled at comprehension. This paper first summarizes the research on reading comprehension with a focus on the cognitive skills and processes that are involved in gaining meaning from text and then reviews studies of reading comprehension deficits in children on the spectrum. The paper concludes with a review of reading comprehension interventions for children on the spectrum. These children can especially benefit from interventions addressing particular cognitive processes, such as locating antecedent events, generating and answering questions, locating referents, and rereading to repair understanding.

Theory into Practice: A Matter of Transfer.

This article explores a new approach to taking theory into practice—one that offers a direct route from research to practice. Traditionally, theory makes its way to practice cloaked in particular curriculum interventions. We argue that taking theory into practice is essentially a matter of transfer—applying teaching and learning principles in new situations. New ideas about transfer have implications for both research and practice. One way to promote the transfer of research into practice is to validate theory in practice by analyzing how the theory maps onto curriculum content to support and organize instruction. Another way of promoting transfer is to rethink the ways that theory can be more directly and relevantly applied to practice. Rather than apply theory to practice, teachers might be encouraged to adapt practice to theory, identifying teaching situations in which research principles might be relevant, and to change their practice accordingly to resolve the immediate problems of practice.