Brief Report: How Accurate is Teacher Report of Autism Symptoms Compared to Parent Report?

The team asked 35 moms and the teachers to fill out the CASD autism checklist on the same preschoolers.

Each child also got a full psychologist assessment with ADOS and ADI-R.

They compared the two sets of scores to see how many true autism cases each adult group missed.

Mothers and teachers each missed over one-third of the children who actually had autism.

When both adults agreed a child did not have autism, they were still wrong 28 percent of the time.

The CASD alone produced high false-negative rates, no matter who filled it out.

Muller et al. (2022) extends this picture: parents who show autism-like traits themselves over-rate symptoms, making the gap even wider.

So et al. (2013) seems to disagree, reporting a short 10-item CBCL/TRF scale caught most autism cases. The difference is they used a tuned brief scale, not the full checklist, so both papers can be true.

Posserud et al. (2009) already showed that combining parent and teacher ASSQ forms with a clear cut-off works better, foreshadowing today’s result that single-informant forms are risky.

If you screen with only a parent or teacher questionnaire, you will miss many autistic learners. Always collect ADOS or similar direct data before you rule autism out. When time is short, use short optimized scales and require both adults to complete them, or move straight to multi-source evaluation.