Impacts of Autism Inclusion on Math and Reading Scores

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Seeing Both Sides

What happens when you bring students with disabilities like Autism into the classroom with the rest of their peers?

This topic touches close to home for me. My sister grew up with a number of learning and speech disabilities and at many schools would have spent her days in a separate classroom dedicated to special needs students. When it came time for high school, my family uprooted and moved specifically so my sister could go to a school with the resources to support full inclusion.

When I started high school (9 years before my sister), special needs students were kept separate. I had little interaction with them and really had very little understanding or empathy for them. Even having a younger sister with special needs, it was difficult for me to make a connection.

When my sister was in high school, she spent nearly all day in standard classrooms with the help of a paraprofessional teaching assistant or 'para.' She had both special needs and non-special needs friends, participated and competed in school sports and activities, and was even elected prom queen. Oh what a difference inclusion had made.

But what about my child?

There is growing support that integration into standard classrooms benefits students with disabilities, but what about the rest of the students? Every parent wants what is best for their child, especially when it comes to school. Some parents worry that inclusion of students with special needs could have a negative impact on learning outcomes. The data and research so far have been unclear about the real impacts that more an more progressive inclusion policy is having on learning.

There are a few reasons why this subject is difficult. First, students with special needs are difficult to categorize. Disabilities come in all types, combinations, and in different levels of severity. Second, schools have only recently began recording data on students with disabilities that includes what type of learning environment they experience.

Defining the question

The first step in getting insights is taking a look at statewide data to see if there are any larger trends. After digging through the data and some scientific articles on the subject, it was clear that looking at 'disabilities' as a whole would likely be irrelevant or produce results that would be difficult to interpret.

For this reason, I narrowed my focus to Autism. Autism itself is not easily defined and is known as Autism Spectrum Disorder specifically because of the large variety in how it affects individuals. From here my question became clear: how does increased inclusion of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) impact test scores of the remaining students? I compared standardized test scores for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading in each state for the last two reporting years available, 2013 and 2015.

The first hurdle was normalizing the data in a way that different states could be compared. Each state has a different percent of students with autism, and not all students experience the same levels of inclusion. One way of thinking about inclusion is the quantifying the influence or exposure that students have to those with ASD. Simply using the % of students with ASD doesn't factor in how much time these students are in the classroom together.

I needed a metric that factored in inclusion. A student with ASD is in a separate classroom all day, or even half the day, has much less impact. To include this detail, students with ASD were weighted based on the amount of time spent in a normal classroom. Students were weighted was based average % of time reported for their learning environment. Example: Students who spent 30-50% of their day in a normal classroom were given a weight of 40%.

Data Analysis

This 'Inclusion Factor' was used as the basis for comparing state test scores. For simplicity, I'll stick with presenting the 8th grade math scores as trends were similar across all comparison combinations by year, grade and subject.

2013: R-squared 0.21, P < 0.01 and 2015: R-squared 0.20, P < 0.01

Simple linear regression showed a positive correlation for all groups. R-squared values ranged from 0.15 to 0.23 and P values were all well below a 0.01 significance threshold.

First it's worth looking at other factors that could be related, the most obvious of these is state spending on education. The comparison uses total state education spending per student in primary and secondary school. Each point is scaled based on the % of students with ASD for all grades.

R-squared = 0.13, P < 0.05

Interestingly, per student spending is explains less variation in the exam score data than inclusion. It's worth noting that this includes all spending, not just that directly related to teaching. But the data does suggest something - learning outcomes are more closely related to the quality of teaching than educational spending.

It is worth mentioning the limitations of this analysis. First, state level comparisons are a good first start, but a more robust analysis would use district, school, or classroom level data. Second, ASD is a very specific type of mental disability and is not representative of other types of special needs. Students with emotional or behavioral disabilities maybe have very different impacts in the classroom.

The data does not support that inclusion of students with Autism is hurting learning outcomes for other students! This should be understated. Bringing students with Autism into the classroom may have positive benefits for a number of reasons.

The first being that teachers need to learn and use a greater variety of teaching methods to better include students with disabilities. This training likely has positive benefits for all students in the classroom. The second reason is many students with special needs have a paraprofessional instructional assistant that works with and accompanies them during their school day. This additional adult and teaching resource inside the classroom may actually help reduce disruptions or give students more resources for help.

Overall the data suggests that there is knowledge to be gained from taking a closer look at the impacts that inclusion is having and impacts inclusion policy is having on teaching.