Cognitive Skills – Students with Additional Learning Needs and Autism Spectrum Disorder

The SWANs cognitive skills instrument was developed in consultation with expert panels of special education teachers to measure the cognitive skills required by students to productively function in their learning environment. Teachers described the learning of 660 students with additional learning needs and ranging in age from 3 to 18 years and over. Students’ current level of proficiency in foundational learning skills, such as attention, memory and executive functioning, was observed and described on a survey by their classroom teachers. Using Rasch partial credit modelling (Masters G, Psychometrica 47:149174, 1982), analysis of person fit statistics suggested irregular patterns of teacher response to the survey items for students described as autistic (n = 257). The student sample was separated into those with an intellectual disability and those with autism spectrum disorder and the data reanalysed for these two groups of students. While there were overall similarities between the emergence of skills for each group, some specific areas of strengths and weaknesses for students with autism spectrum disorder became apparent. This suggested the possibility of reporting two different and interpretable progressions of cognitive skill development: one for students with an intellectual disability and one for those with autism spectrum disorder. This chapter discusses these results and how the analyses were used to build reports that allow teachers to consider their pedagogical practices and intervention plans for these students within a developmental learning paradigm.