Academic attainment in students with autism spectrum disorders in distance education

Abstract

This investigation studied attainment in students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) who were taking modules by distance learning with the UK Open University in 2012. Students with ASDs who had no additional disabilities were as likely as non-disabled students to complete the modules that they had taken, to pass the modules that they had completed and to obtain good grades for the modules that they had passed. Students with ASDs who had additional disabilities were less likely than non-disabled students to complete the modules that they had taken, but they were as likely as non-disabled students to pass the modules that they had completed and to obtain good grades for the modules that they had passed. Their lower completion rate presumably reflects the impact of their additional disabilities rather than their ASDs. In distance education, at least, students with ASDs tend to perform on a par with their non-disabled peers.

Keywords:

• Academic attainment
• autism spectrum disorders
• disabled students
• distance education

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to James Forman for generating the data-set that was analysed in this study and to Emma Greenstein and Kate Lister for advice concerning support for students with ASDs at the Open University.

Notes

1. For these and other data, see https://www.hesa.ac.uk/content/view/1973/239/. The figure of 1995 students implies a prevalence of ASDs across the UK higher education sector of .27%. Nevertheless, this excludes students with ASDs who have additional disabilities. They are recorded by the Higher Education Statistics Agency as having multiple disabilities and cannot be separately identified as having ASDs. It should also be noted that the Agency rounds reported frequency values to the nearest multiple of five to prevent the disclosure of personal information about any individual.

2. In 2012, the UK government required English universities to increase their fees to reflect the true cost of delivering their programmes and extended the availability of student loans. To qualify for loans, students have to register for specific qualifications, and since 2012 a majority of Open University students in England and Northern Ireland have registered for entire degree programmes rather than for individual modules.

3. In North America, ‘unseen disabilities’ are more commonly referred to as ‘invisible disabilities’ or ‘hidden disabilities’. However, ‘unseen disabilities’ is widely regarded as an unsatisfactory term because it covers a large and heterogeneous group of disabilities. Even so, it is routinely used in UK national statistics on education, and diabetes, epilepsy and asthma are the most commonly cited examples. The Open University’s records do not permit the disaggregation of different groups of students within this category.

4. Most first degrees in the UK are awarded with honours, which are usually classified as first, second or third class, and the second class is normally categorised into an upper and a lower division. A degree that is awarded with either first-class or upper second-class honours is often described as a ‘good’ degree. When determining the class of honours degrees at the Open University, the boundary between Grades 2 and 3 maps onto that between upper and lower second-class honours.

5. There is a suggestion that, in the UK at least, the prevalence of ASDs may have reached a plateau in the last 10 years (B. Taylor, Jick, & MacLaughlin, 2013).