Advances in School-Based Interventions for Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Introduction to the Special Issue.
Most autism interventions are proven in clinics, not classrooms, so school BCBAs must borrow cautiously and collect their own data.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McGarty et al. (2018) wrote a narrative introduction to a special issue.
They looked at where autism intervention research is done.
Most studies happen in preschool clinics, not in K-12 classrooms.
What they found
The authors found a big gap.
We have lots of clinic proof, but little school proof.
They urged researchers to test interventions where kids actually spend their days.
How this fits with other research
Parsons et al. (2013) made the same plea five years earlier.
Kasari et al. (2013) added how-to advice: manualize loosely and track long-term real-life goals.
Stewart et al. (2018) mapped 84 school studies and showed most still sit in separate rooms, backing the worry.
Clark et al. (1977) offered hope: one child with one-to-one aide and teacher training thrived in a regular first-grade room decades ago.
Why it matters
If you write a behavior plan for a student with autism, you may be flying blind.
Use the few school-tested tools we have, like CBT for anxiety shown by Clarke et al. (2017) and scaled by Reaven et al. (2024).
Track simple classroom data and share it with the team.
Push for research partners so we can grow a real school evidence base together.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
As the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has increased, so too has research on interventions to address core and associated features of autism. Although many methodologically rigorous studies on interventions have been reported, their relevance to educators is somewaht unclear. For example, only about 32% of evidence-based strategies identifed in these reviews were conducted in k-12 settings. Current literature also is limited in that, although many studies show that interventions can improve the communication and social interaction skills of individuals with autism, most of this work has been conducted with pre-school children; questions remain about the generality of these findings to school-aged children. Further, there are relatively few studies demonstrating effective interventions for restricted and repetitive behavior and much of this work was conducted in clinical settings. There is a need for studies documenting effective interventions that are feasible in school settings. The purpose of this special issue is two-fold. First, to highlight the need for school-based research with students with autism and second to highlight recent work delineating intervention strategies found to be effective in school settings.
Behavior modification, 2018 · doi:10.1177/0145445517743582