Abstract
AbstractSupport from teachers is a key strategy for accommodating students with Asperger syndrome (AS) diagnosis in the mainstream classroom. Teachers’ understanding and expectations of students, i.e. their social representations (SR), have a bearing on how they interact and accommodate, but little is known about why. Therefore, the current study examined the idea that teachers’ SR of these students are influenced by their previous experience with AS. To this end, Swedish mainstream teachers were invited to anonymously answer a web-based questionnaire (N = 153). An association task was used to obtain data on teachers’ SR and the content and structure of the SR were explored. Our results suggest that work-related experience of AS and/or private experience shape teachers’ SR of these students relative to teachers with no experience. Moreover, teachers with previous experience had more SR elements related to environment and learning factors while teachers without previous experience had more elements related...
Highlights
Preventing students with Asperger Syndrome (AS) from dropping out of mainstream education is a worldwide concern (Mavropoulou & Avramidis, 2012; Moores-Abdool, 2010; Probst & Leppert, 2008)
In order to evaluate the role of experience, we first examined possible differences in the valence of the phrases provided in the free association
We compared the frequency of categories of (a) teachers with versus without experience and (b) teachers with work-related versus private experience of students with Asperger syndrome (AS) by calculating relative risk increase (RRI)
Summary
Preventing students with Asperger Syndrome (AS) from dropping out of mainstream education is a worldwide concern (Mavropoulou & Avramidis, 2012; Moores-Abdool, 2010; Probst & Leppert, 2008). Policy underscores an inclusive agenda (Humphrey & Lewis, 2008; Isaksson, Lindqvist, & Bergström, 2007), but schools have yet to live up to this goal given the number of students with AS who drop out of school (Parsons & Lewis, 2010; Swedish National Agency for Education [SNAE], 2009). AS is a pervasive disorder that affects how a person makes sense of the world, processes information, and relates to other people and it is one of three entities within the broader Autism Spectrum Disorder in DSM IV (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994). The new DSM V (APA, 2013) does not highlight the sub-entities, AS is still used as a term and many people have already received the diagnosis and it is still included in the ICD-10 (Tsai & Ghaziuddin, 2014)
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