Behavior profiles of children with autism spectrum disorder in kindergarten: Comparison with other developmental disabilities and typically developing children.
Teacher-completed kindergarten checklists already flag autism-related social-emotional gaps that mirror later executive-function deficits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Janus et al. (2018) asked kindergarten teachers to fill out the Early Development Instrument. The form rates kids on five domains: physical, social, emotional, language, and thinking skills.
The sample included children with autism, other developmental delays, and typically developing peers. All children were in regular kindergarten classrooms.
What they found
Children with autism scored lower than their typical peers on every domain. The biggest gap showed up in social-emotional skills.
Kids whose autism was spotted late had slightly better thinking scores but still very low social-emotional scores compared with other disabled peers.
How this fits with other research
Krakowski et al. (2026) looked at toddlers and found large executive-function deficits in two- to four-year-olds with autism. The kindergarten pattern in Janus et al. (2018) lines up: early EF trouble shows up as low teacher-rated social-emotional scores a year later.
Gandhi et al. (2022) used the BRIEF-2 with first- and second-graders. Teachers again rated students with autism as far weaker in flexibility, working memory, and self-control. The gap seen in kindergarten EDI scores stays put in early elementary.
Sparapani et al. (2016) watched preschoolers in a lab. Children with autism asked for help less often than peers with other delays. Low help-seeking may explain why the same children later earn low EDI social-emotional scores: they do not use adults to regulate.
Why it matters
You can spot risk before a formal autism diagnosis. If a kindergarten teacher marks very low social-emotional scores on the EDI, probe further and consider an autism screen. Use the same teacher input to shape early goals around self-regulation, joint attention, and help-seeking rather than waiting for full testing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Monitoring behavior patterns that may be specific to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at a population level has the potential to improve the allocation of intervention strategies and reduction of the burden of the disease. In Ontario, Canada, developmental data are regularly collected for all kindergarten children with the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a teacher-completed questionnaire that provides information on children's status in five domains: physical, social, emotional, language/cognitive, and communication/general knowledge. Our main research questions are: (a) are there differences in kindergarten EDI domain scores between children who are diagnosed with ASD by Grade 3 and those who develop typically or have other disabilities?; (b) do these differences show a different pattern in relation to an early (by kindergarten) or late (by Grade 3) diagnosis?; and (c) are there specific subdomains on the EDI that demonstrate a consistent pattern of differences? EDI domain and subdomain scores were compared among groups using multivariate analysis of variance controlling for age, gender, EDI year, and EDI year by age interaction. Children with ASD, regardless of timing of identification, had significantly lower scores on all domains of the EDI than typically developing children. Children with later ASD diagnosis had higher scores in kindergarten in cognitive areas but lower scores in social-emotional areas than children with other disabilities. These findings support the potential of the EDI to monitor ASD-like behaviors at the population level. Autism Res 2018, 11: 410-420. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Identifying behavior patterns among kindergarten children that may be specific to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at a population level has the potential to improve intervention strategies and thus reduce the burden of the disease. In Ontario, Canada, developmental data are regularly collected with the Early Development Instrument (EDI) for all kindergarten children. The behavior in kindergarten of a sub-population of children diagnosed with developmental disabilities by age 9 is investigated here for patterns that may distinguish children with ASD from those with other disorders. Children with later ASD diagnosis had higher scores in kindergarten in cognitive areas but lower scores in social-emotional areas than children with other disabilities, indicating meaningful differences between those groups even before diagnosis. These results support the potential of using the EDI to monitor ASD-like behaviors at the population level.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.1904