What Learning Strategies Do Children and Youth with ASD Have That Might Help Them Learn Categorization?

We learn things using strategies, although we often do not notice when we use these. Each of us have our own learning style. What kinds of learning strategies do people with ASD use?

Visual Spatial

In her book, Do-Watch-Listen-Say: Social and Communication Intervention for Children with Autism, Quill (2000) explains how children with autism learn.

... it is generally easier for them[children with autism] to process visual information that does not rapidly change. In contrast to fleeting visual auditory information, visuospatial stimuli (e.g., objects, pictures, graphics, written language) are fixed in space and time, and therefore, are often easier for the children to process. (p.?)

Visual cues and prompts help children with ASD learn categorization skills. Depending on the child’s age and ability, it is often helpful to start with more concrete cues, and move on to more abstract or symbolic cues as the child masters the information at the concrete level. When introducing new categorization activities, you might move from easy to more difficult in the following way:

• actual item
• model of the actual item
• color photo
• black and white drawing

So, if you’re sorting apples and oranges, start out with the actual fruit, then move on to toy fruit, then photos, and finally black and white drawings. Please note, however, that because students with ASD may differ from one another, this hierarchy may work for one child, but not another.

Haptic

Researchers use the term haptic modality to refer to an activity that can be physically touched and manipulated. Many children and youth with ASD react strongly to various textures. Quite a few are compelled to touch just about everything they see. Others seek out certain items to touch while avoiding others. In many cases, in order for an activity to have meaning, the child must touch it. We all learn a good deal about things if we feel the weight, texture, shape, and temperature of an item.

Meaningful Rules

Children and youth with ASD can be great rule followers, taking comfort in the predictability and concreteness of rules. All games have rules, whether it be a game of solitaire, a board game, or a basketball game. The rules for sorting laundry, for example, may be to sort by color (visual) and texture (haptic). We need to make sure that the rules are sensible and relate meaningfully to the activity. We wouldn’t have a rule, for example, to sort clothes based on what someone ate for breakfast that day!

Self-Talk

If you’ve ever watched the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you’ll have seen examples of how talking to oneself can help a person get organized when trying to solve a problem.

Frequently, the contestants talk about the questions and possible answers before deciding what to do. Many individuals with ASD use self-talk in a less functional, repetitive manner. However, teaching children with ASD to use language to guide their thinking is an effective technique when working with categorization activities. Self-talk can help children organize their thoughts, rehearse the rules and expectations of the activity, and communicate to others (whether intentional or not) what they are thinking and the processes they are using to figure out how to solve a problem.

Key Points:

• Visual cues and prompts help with categorization.
• Physically manipulating and touching objects can make a categorization activity more meaningful.
• Rules must be meaningful and relate to a categorization activity.
• Self-talk can is a strategy that helps with organization in categorization activities.

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