Autism Testing

Essay by nick1234College, UndergraduateA, October 2014

download word file, 3 pages 0.0

The article i have chosen is called The Hidden Potential of Autistic Kids: What intelligence tests might be overlooking when it comes to Autism, By Rose Eveleth. This article states how the autistic population is often viewed as unintelligent or incapable of learning. Society seems to come to the conclusion that autistic children cannot learn, when really they may just not learn the same way others do. Children are commonly given an intelligence test called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), this is accurately administered for a normal child, but almost a trick to fail an autistic brain. The test is completely verbal and timed which solely relies on cultural and social knowledge. So after seeing the poor autistic results of the WISC, the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) is administered to children, which is requested to complete designs and patterns with mostly nonverbal instructions, and autistic children scored 30-70 percent better.

So in conclusion, the autistic brain is not being tested to the best of their ability and only viewing their weakness' opposed to their intellectual strengths.

This is a complete stereotype on the autistic brain on how they are unintelligent and incapable of learning. It is an assumption of what someone is like, generally secondhand and resistant to change. Most people that have no knowledge on autism or any intellectual disability stereotypes the entire effected population as "Mentally Retarded " and views them as different. They all have their own strengths and weakness' just as everyone else does. I think this shows a good example of role-taking, these researchers put themselves into an autistic persons situation and viewed it as if they could not understand what was going on and found a better route for testing them on what they can really do. Researchers have to...