Podcast # 9

The podcast # 9 is about schools at the center of educational research in Autism: Possibility practices and promises. The researchers told about studies that involved interventions that were carried out in school settings, despite the small number of studies available in the context of schools. Presumably the reason of the low quantity is the several challenges that researchers have to overcome when deciding to study the real-world setting. First, they need a considerable amount of time to get to know the schools, being able to create a trust between themselves, the school staff and the parents. Additionally, they need to get consent from all the people involved to be allowed to get into the classroom. Moreover, they have the responsibility

They examined a unique model of collaboration in the U.K., that reflected how the research can inform teaching and vice versa. The study concluded that power and responsibility needs to be shared between researchers and teachers for the research to be relevant and meaningful. In other words, there is a need of an exchange of knowledge between researches and schools rather than a transfer of knowledge from researchers to schools.

In my opinion, science in general should focus in the real-world experiments. Commonly, researches are conducted in a theoretical perspective, without considering the every day issues neither the applicability of the study. For this reason, I believe that the most significant point that the interviewees highlighted is the importance of involving teachers and the school community and also asking students about their opinions. Clearly, it would increase the probability that the research would be relevant and suitable for the reality of the schools and the

In executive function tests, that measure planning skills and cognitive flexibility, people with autism will usually show lower performance than the general population. For this test, females with autism did better than males. Additionally, the scientists found out that the relationship between stereotypic behavior and cognitive flexibility is quite strong, and this relationship is stronger in males than in females, which can be an explanation for the different performance.

On the other hand, the sample with autism performed better in attention to detail tasks than siblings without autism, and males scored slightly better than females within the adolescents with autism. With this result, the author had the hypothesis that males and females have a particular style to make sense of the world, and different interests. Another theory that he presented from this is that attention to detail could be a requisite for special talents in autism, and that could be the reason of superior prevalence of high function in males rather than