Teacher responses to anxiety-related behaviours in students on the autism spectrum
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
There has been a dearth of research into the presentation and impact of anxiety in autism within the school context and little is known about teacher response to anxiety-related behaviour in this population. This study adds to our knowledge of how teachers are likely to respond to anxiety-related behaviour in students with autism and whether this differs from their responses to students without an autism diagnosis. Teachers were found to be significantly more likely to use responses categorised
Methods
Ethical clearance for this study was granted through the Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee, approval number 2017/958.
Anxiety-promoting subscale
Teacher ratings of the likelihood of responding to the students with or without autism with specific responses are summarised in Table 2 (a higher score reflects an increased likelihood of responding with that specific response with a maximum score of 7 representing “very likely”). Comparisons of the anxiety subscale scores indicate that teachers were significantly more likely to respond with anxiety-promoting responses to a student with a diagnosis of autism than a student without a diagnosis
Discussion
This is the first study to explore teacher responses to anxiety-related behaviours in students with autism and compare how these may differ from responses to students without a diagnosis of autism. The findings from this study clearly show that teachers are, in many ways, likely to respond to anxiety differently when a student has a diagnosis of autism compared to students without autism. One of the principal areas of difference was the greater likelihood that teachers would use
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the financial support of an internal Griffith University School of Education and Professional Studies Seeding Grant.
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