Research Behind the Book
Children on the spectrum are known for many unique abilities. They are extremely passionate about what interests them, show wonderful attention to detail, and have an amazing knack for recognizing words. It is precisely because they have such special talents that it can be surprising that they often experience difficulty with other aspects of reading. These areas include semantics, recognizing main ideas, forming generalizations, using prior knowledge, and understanding grammar. Children on the spectrum may also have a hard time connecting with the emotions or motives of characters in a book because they often interpret other people’s perspectives in unique ways (1). Some children on the spectrum are hyperlexic, exhibiting strong word-decoding ability but relative difficulty understanding sentences or passages (2). Today, narrative competence is not only important for academic achievement (1), but also helps with numerous other aspects of life; it fosters self-confidence, encourages general independence, expands vocabulary for thoughts and communication, induces greater engagement in society, and so much more (3). Thus, the importance of measures to enhance reading comprehension in children on the spectrum cannot be overstated.
Like “It’s my Birthday!”, picture books with embedded audio may be especially helpful for children on the spectrum, as they tend to be strong visual and auditory learners (4). To help the child better understand characters’ emotions, the illustrations in this book are geared towards depicting characters’ facial expressions that reflect their internal state. The embedded audio was recorded by the author to convey the character’s emotional state in a specific moment of dialogue.
Additionally, special interventions may also help address common areas of linguistic challenges in children on the spectrum. The interventions used in this book (bolding relevant details, anaphoric cueing, comprehension questions, questions about characters' emotional states, and cloze procedures) were implemented based on previous studies that investigated the effectiveness of such measures.
In a study by Catherine Roux, et al. of Université du Québec à Montréal, researchers implemented a specific program for children on the spectrum (5). The participants identified main ideas of texts through guiding questions, memorized new vocabulary, and learned to recognize the antecedents of pronouns by asking themselves: “Who is [pronoun]?” The study found that, compared to the students who didn’t receive this intervention, students who did had higher scores in identifying main ideas and anaphoric relations (relationships between pronouns and nouns). Inspired by these findings, I decided to incorporate anaphoric cueing (helping identify which noun or noun phrase a pronoun is referring to) and main idea-related questions throughout the book.
A study by Whalone and Hanline of Florida State University tested the effects of a guided reciprocal questioning intervention (6). Before the actual intervention, every child on the spectrum participating in the study was paired with a general education peer. They then took turns reading a storybook aloud, and were told to ask questions to one another about the story. Then, during “elements of a story instruction,” the researcher taught the elements of a story (setting, characters, events, problem, solution) to each child on the spectrum, and asked questions about each element specific to the story read. During SCORE instruction, the researcher helped small groups of 3 general education peers and one participant on the spectrum work productively together. The main intervention came after all three procedures, and consisted of the researcher and student alternatively asking questions related to the elements of the story being read. If the student answered correctly, the researcher complimented them; if they didn’t, the researcher put the response in context and demonstrated how to find the answer in the text. As a result, all participants on the spectrum showed improved levels of question generation and response while reading the story. Based on this study, I chose to include in my book questions about elements of a story; I also bolded parts of the text that were relevant to answering the questions in order to emulate the effect of the researcher modeling how to find the answer inside the text.
In a related study, researchers carried out peer tutoring of vocabulary words, post-reading comprehension questions, and comprehension game of characters and facts in small groups. Each small group consisted of one child on the spectrum and three general education peers. After these interventions, all participants showed improved academic engagement and social interaction. Therefore, I developed a list of post-reading comprehension questions in my book in order to make sure that the reader has an accurate understanding of the story.
Another study, led by Irene O’Connor of Canada’s McMaster University, investigated the benefit of three separate interventions: pre-reading questions, anaphoric cueing, and cloze task (completing the blanks in a piece of text) (7). It was discovered that, while both cloze procedures and anaphoric cueing led to self-monitoring behaviors in participants on the spectrum, only anaphoric cuing substantially enhanced more than half the participants’ post-reading comprehension levels. I chose to include a cloze task in my book along with anaphoric cueing questions, however, as there is still the possibility that some children on the spectrum may benefit significantly from cloze tasks than others.
Finally, a study looked at ways to help children on the spectrum better understand social cues (8). The participants were presented with various scenarios, and explicitly told to pay attention to the voice and facial expression of the characters involved. When instructed, children on the spectrum engaged a lot of the same brain regions that typically-developing children regularly used. This suggests that instructing children on the spectrum to pay attention to socially relevant cues may help them better understand the speaker's intentions and emotional state. Based on this research, I added questions about the characters’ emotions with guidelines that explicitly tell the reader to focus on the character’s voice (from recorded audio) and facial expression (from the corresponding illustration).
While these studies cannot be generalized to all people on the spectrum, they undeniably testify to the potential advantages of reading interventions. Because all of the above interventions were implemented by researchers, they are not readily available to the public. It is my hope that, through this book, more children on the spectrum can experience the potential benefit of such interventions.
References:
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892026/
2: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10883576070220040601
3: https://autismawarenesscentre.com/literacy-a-skill-for-life-for-individuals-with-asd/
4: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/autism-spectrum-disorders-asd/index.shtml
5:https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1057963.pdf
