Teacher-Student Interactions of Autistic Adolescents: Relationships between Teacher Autonomy Support, Structure, Involvement and Student Engagement.
Autistic secondary students engage more when teachers offer autonomy, but inclusive classrooms rarely do it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Esqueda Villegas et al. (2025) watched autistic teens in inclusive classrooms across two countries.
They coded every teacher move for autonomy support, structure, and involvement.
Then they linked each move to how engaged the student looked right after.
What they found
Students leaned in more when teachers offered choices or asked for their ideas.
Yet those helpful autonomy moments were rare; structure and teacher talk filled most periods.
The gap shows a free, low-cost lever is sitting unused.
How this fits with other research
Horgan et al. (2023) asked autistic teens how school feels; they called it "socially overwhelming." Fernanda’s cameras now show one reason why: teachers rarely hand them the conversational wheel.
Hsiao et al. (2013) linked more autistic traits to worse grades and peer rejection. Fernanda flips the script—when teachers do offer autonomy, engagement rises even in the same teens. The studies seem opposite until you see age and method: Mei-Ni sampled younger, mixed-ability classes; Fernanda zoomed in on diagnosed adolescents in inclusive rooms.
Oppenheim et al. (2025) found that warm, organized preschool rooms boost autistic boys’ social play. Fernanda extends the idea up the grades: big-kid social growth also hinges on teacher style, but the key ingredient shifts from warmth to student choice.
Why it matters
You can raise engagement without new programs or paraphernalia. In your next lesson, build in two student-choice points—let them pick the order of problems or the format of the exit ticket. Watch who leans forward; that micro-autonomy may do more than another social-skills worksheet ever could.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The extent to which autistic students are provided with autonomy-support, structure and involvement during the teacher-student interaction has been under-researched. Few studies have focused on autistic secondary school students and even fewer have used observations to analyze their interactions. In this research, we aimed to understand the interaction dynamics between autistic students and their teachers in the Netherlands and Mexico; two countries committed to inclusive education. Six teacher-student dyads from five mainstream secondary schools in the Netherlands and seven teacher-student dyads from one school in Mexico participated. We used a fine-grained observational method to describe the classroom interactions, systematically coded from the lens of Self-Determination Theory. To study the interaction as a whole and co-occurring teacher and student behaviors (rather than breaking it down into separate parts), we used State Space Grids. Teacher-student interactions varied widely. In general, Dutch and Mexican teachers provided much structure in the classroom, which (in many cases) coincided with the active engagement of autistic students. At the same time, autistic students in both countries received little autonomy-support. However, when these students received autonomy-support, they responded with more engagement. In contrast, both engaged and disengaged student behaviors occurred when the teacher showed involvement. The desired patterns of interaction were not observed in all teacher-student pairs. Our findings indicate that teachers in both countries are missing opportunities to be autonomy-supportive. This contextual factor was minimally observed in the teacher-student interactions, particularly when compared to the levels of structure and involvement provided during lessons.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1080/00461520.2020.1793763