Writing Self-Concept, Text Engagement, and Writing Practices Across Contexts: Comparisons Between School-Age Children on the Autism Spectrum and Their Non-Autistic Peers.
Autistic kids feel as positive about writing as peers, but their story quality is less predicted by confidence or practice.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cruz-Montecinos et al. (2024) asked 8- to young learners to rate how good they think they are at writing. Half were autistic, half were not.
The kids also told how often they write stories, emails, or diary entries. Then each child wrote a short story that researchers scored for detail and structure.
What they found
Both groups gave themselves almost the same writing scores. They also reported doing most writing tasks at the same rate.
Only the non-autistic kids showed the usual link: believing "I write well" plus writing often predicted a stronger story. Autistic kids’ stories were less tied to these beliefs.
How this fits with other research
Chapple et al. (2021) saw a similar pattern with adults and reading. Autistic and typical adults both said fiction helps them understand people, showing shared self-views across literacy tasks.
Godfrey et al. (2023) found autistic youth forget story details faster and skip using big-picture themes. Together, these studies suggest autistic learners may need extra help linking self-beliefs to narrative skills.
Morsanyi et al. (2012) showed autistic teens struggle with pretend scenarios. C et al. now add that weaker tie between self-concept and narrative output starts earlier, in elementary years.
Why it matters
If you run writing lessons, do not assume a confident autistic child will automatically apply strategies. Build in explicit links: show how planning sheets, graphic organizers, or peer review turn "I’m good" into better stories. Collect brief writing samples often and give feedback tied to the child’s own goals, not just rubrics.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
PURPOSE: Autistic children demonstrate highly variable written language skills. Existing research has focused on examining autistic children's performance on direct assessments of written language. In contrast, few studies have sought to understand how autistic children conceptualize their writing abilities or engage with writing across different contexts compared to non-autistic peers. METHODS: This study used a researcher-designed questionnaire to examine writing self-concept, text engagement with different writing activities, and writing practices and beliefs across school and non-school contexts in school-age (10-18 years old) autistic children compared to their non-autistic peers. Data analysis approaches included "multiple indicators, multiple causes" (MIMIC) modeling; correlational and multiple regression analysis; non-parametric Mann-Whitney U tests; and principal components analysis. RESULTS: Groups did not differ in their writing self-concept ratings. Furthermore, both groups engaged with a variety of different writing activities to a similar extent except for text messages being lower for the autistic group. Five components were extracted via principal components analysis on items related to writing practices and beliefs across contexts; groups did not differ across the components. Overall, the non-autistic group showed more consistent relationships between writing self-concept as well as writing practices and beliefs with performance on a narrative writing task when compared to the autistic group. CONCLUSION: Results offer a preliminary understanding into how autistic children engage with writing across contexts for a variety of purposes when compared to their non-autistic peers and offer implications for continued research and educational practice.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2024 · doi:10.1177/0741932510394872