Exploration of Writing Attitudes and Genre Knowledge in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Impact on Writing Quality

Background: Previous research has demonstrated that writing is one of the most challenging academic skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with a majority of children demonstrating a learning disability in writing (Mayes & Calhoun, 2006). However, little is known about how other factors impact the writing process, such as knowledge about text structure or attitudes towards writing. This is of interest as research with neurotypical (NT) children has shown that both factors are related to writing achievement (Graham et al., 2007; Olinghouse et al., 2015).

Objectives: We examined whether children with ASD had similar attitudes towards writing and knowledge of genre structure compared to NT children. Relations between writing attitudes and knowledge and overall text quality were also examined.

Methods: Forty-three children, 21 with ASD (M_age= 11;11) and 23 NT children (M_age= 10;07), participated in this study. Children with ASD had a previously established diagnosis of ASD. Diagnoses were confirmed with the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2; Constantino, 2012) and Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS-2; Schopler et al., 2010). See Table 1 for additional participant characteristics.

Following parent and child consent, children completed a narrative and an expository writing task, and received a holistic rating of writing quality for each. After completing these tasks, the experimenter asked the child, “What do you think are important things or elements to include when writing a good story/essay?”. Children’s responses were classified into one of four ratings, from 1 = doesn’t have a good grasp of story/essay elements, to 4 = has a very good grasp of story/essay elements.

Children also completed the 12-item writing attitudes subtest adapted from Graham, Berninger, & Abbott’s (2012) Writing and Reading Attitude Measure. This includes questions such as “How do you feel when you write in school during free time?” or “How do you feel when you start to write a new paper?” Additional questions were asked to determine which aspects of writing children found to be most challenging.

Results: Despite children with ASD having lower overall writing quality scores, children with ASD did not differ from NT children in their ability to define the important elements of narrative and essay writing, or in their overall attitude towards writing (see Table 2). However, children with ASD were more likely to identify lower-level processes of writing (e.g., handwriting, attention/motivation, spelling) as the most challenging aspect of writing compared to NT children whose most common complaint was idea generation.

In terms of associations with writing quality, greater knowledge of narrative and essay structure was related to the production of higher quality texts, but only for NT children. No relations were found between writing attitudes and quality for either group.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that the process of writing may be more challenging for children with ASD to execute, even when they understand the requirements of a given text type and feel similarly about the writing process. Thus, writing instruction for children with ASD may need to focus on the unique challenges these children face (e.g., handwriting, spelling).