Autistic children benefitted from online literacy instruction during COVID pandemic
Flinders University
Despite many obstacles presented by students being at home during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the autistic children involved in this research project still showed significant progress through online instruction.
Flinders University’s Professor Joanne Arciuli, who led the feasibility study, says that developing useful tools for this area of literacy teaching plugs a gap in autistic care.
“Children with autism present with highly diverse and non-uniform reading profiles, with some experiencing difficulties with reading comprehension more than reading accuracy skills,” says Professor Arciuli.
She points to 2021 research of 26 studies involving more than 1200 autistic children, which showed that word reading scores were higher on average than reading comprehension scores.
While the feasibility study was originally designed to test the effects of small-group face-to-face literacy instruction on the reading skills of autistic children in an area of relative sociodemographic inequity, these plans changed due to stay-at-home orders issued mid-way through the study – from group-based to one-to-one instruction, and from in person to online delivery.
“It ended up being a steep learning curve to conduct a trial in an area of socioeconomic disadvantage in Western Sydney during a global pandemic,” says Professor Arciuli.
“The study continued because we had an ethical duty to continue providing services to research participants, so we moved instruction online via telepractice with the interactive web application ABRACADABRA – and this unexpected change offered a unique opportunity to explore the effects of literacy instruction under the same ‘real world’ conditions impacting clinical settings at the time.
“Autistic child participants in our two instruction groups did make some gains in reading abilities compared to a control group, which is interesting because of the mandated disruptions and complex personal and family issues experienced by our participants.”
The outcomes underline the value of a tool such as ABRACADABRA, a free online interactive web application with 33 activities, designed to support children's development in alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics), reading fluency, reading comprehension (vocabulary and comprehension strategies) and writing (spelling).
Developed in 2002 by the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, the modular ABRACADABRA program can provide highly individualised literacy instruction.
The outcomes produced a surprise. “We hypothesised initially that children in instruction conditions would achieve gains in their reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills, and that children participating in shared book reading activities would achieve greater gains in reading comprehension than children who did not participate in these. However, children who participated in the intervention conditions made significant gains compared with the control group.”
Professor Arciuli says the application of this research could have far-reaching benefits for telepractice delivery of literacy instruction, especially for children with autism in rural or remote areas who cannot access face-to-face instruction.
The research – “ABRACADABRA literacy instruction delivered by speech-language pathologists to children with autism during the COVID-19 pandemic”, by Annemarie Murphy, Benjamin Bailey, Robert Savage, Rauno Parrila and Joanne Arciuli – has been published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. DOI:10.1080/17549507.2025.2555990.
Journal
International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
ABRACADABRA literacy instruction delivered by speech-language pathologists to children with autism during the COVID-19 pandemic
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