With the increasing emphasis on writing in national and state assessments, schools, districts, and states have felt the pressure to reassess the methods used to teaching writing. Such assessment is all the more critical considering the number of children, including those with disabilities, who struggle with writing. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (Greenwald, Persky, Campbell, & Mazzeo, 2002), the writing performance of 14% of students in grades 4 fall below a “basic” level of writing achievement. That percentage escalates to 44% for students with an identified disability.

One way to address this problem is to provide exemplary writing instruction beginning in the primary grades. Early instructional intervention programs typically attempt to accelerate the progress of struggling writers by providing them with additional instruction, with the desired outcome of helping these writers catch up with their peers early-on before their difficulties. Such interventions may maximize the writing development of children in general, minimize the number of students who develop writing problems as a result of poor instruction, reduce the effects of difficulties with writing experienced by children with writing disabilities, and may produce more powerful benefits than later remediation efforts (Harris, Graham, Mason, & Saddler, 2002; Graham, Harris, & Fink, 2000).

Early instructional intervention in writing has proven effectual for students with writing disabilities in general (e.g. Saddler, Moran, Graham, & Harris, 2004; Graham, Harris, & Fink, 2000; Danoff, Harris, & Graham, 1993). However, there has been little research conducted in this area with writers with more severe disabilities, and in particular, children with Asperger syndrome who also struggle with writing. In general, Asperger syndrome (AS) is a disability that has not been widely researched (Saffran, 2001). However, as an increasing number of children are diagnosed with AS (Myles & Simpson, 2001), there is a greater need to focus on this disability and how to help children with AS perform to the best of their ability in the classroom in general, and with writing in particular.

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a disorder that typically falls on the high end of the autism spectrum (Griffin, Griffin, Fitch, Albera, & Gingras, 2006). Similar to autism, characteristics of the disorder include inappropriate social skills, lack of emotional reciprocity, stereotypical patterns of behavior, and motor/coordination issues (Falk-Ross, Iverson, & Gilbert, 2004). People with AS require a great deal of structure and exhibit inflexible thinking patterns (Bruey, 2004). Unlike autism, however, children and adults with AS often have average or above average language and cognitive functioning (Robledo & Ham-Kucharski, 2005).

These factors tend to make teaching children with AS a difficult task. Most students with AS are taught in the general education classroom with consultant services (Myles & Simpson, 2001), and are provided training primarily for social skills and behavioral interventions. Little research, however, has focused on the gaps in academic functioning that exist in children with AS. In particular, few studies have been conducted in the area of story writing, even though writing is one of the areas in which children with AS typically have difficulty (Griffin et al, 2006).

The research that has been completed in this area has yielded important information about the potential writing difficulties children with AS may present. First, children with Asperger Syndrome demonstrated more variability in their sentence composition than did neurotypically developing children (Myles, Huggins, Rome-Lake, Hagiwara, Barnhill, and Griswold, 2003). In particular, their writing samples had fewer morphemes, words, t-units, and sentences. This suggests that children with AS may need further instruction in elaborating their thoughts and their ability to write in depth (Myles, et al., 2003). Second, while there were similarities in their writing, children with AS differ from typically developing children in their syntax and semantic device use, and the number of story elements utilized. They are also less likely to provide causal explanations and insight into internal states (Losh & Caps, 2003). Third, children with autism and AS performed significantly lower than children with moderate learning difficulties and typically developing children on tests of creativity and imagination (Craig & Baron-Cohen, 1999). This finding has great implications on the ability of students with AS to write creative stories.

These children have difficulty organizing their thoughts and transferring them to paper and may require extended planning time and assistance in outlining their thoughts (Moore, 2002). They have very literal thinking foci and consequently may lack imaginative ideation, and may also have difficulty imagining possible future events and scenarios (Winter, 2003). Such literal, current-thinking attributes may directly impact their ability to create an imaginary story. For these reasons, children with AS may need further instruction in elaborating their thoughts and their ability to write in depth (Myles, et al., 2003).

Because children with AS struggle with writing, there exists a need to help these students develop more age appropriate writing skills. Although there is little evidence to support the efficacy of specific writing interventions for children with AS, there is good amount of research supporting various interventional writing strategies for children with disabilities and writing deficits in general. Furthermore, we know how to teach these strategies effectively.

Learner Outcomes/Learning Objectives

In this presentation, we will describe one such validated model for teaching strategies to less skilled writers, the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach (see Harris & Graham, 1992). With SRSD, students are instructed using strategies for various aspects of the writing process including planning and revising text in combination with techniques for regulating these strategies and the writing process (Graham & Harris, 1993). The major goals of SRSD as related to writing include helping writers (a) master the higher-level cognitive processes involved in writing; (b) develop autonomous, reflective, self-regulated use of effective writing strategies; and (c) form positive attitudes about writing and about themselves as writers (Harris, 1982). When using SRSD to teach a strategy, Graham and Harris (1993) recommend that a teacher work recursively through six stages of instruction. These stages serve as a “metascript” which a teacher should modify to meet his/her students' needs. We will describe the following stages in our presentation: 1. Develop Background Knowledge: During this stage the teacher helps students develop pre-skills needed to understand, acquire, and execute the target strategy far enough to allow the students to move to the next stage. 2. Discuss It: In this stage the teacher and students examine and discuss prior performance and the writing strategies the students presently utilize. Next, the benefits and significance of the proposed strategy instruction are discussed, and any mnemonic device used in the strategy is introduced. The students are asked to commit to be collaborative partners and apply themselves to learning the strategy. The groundwork for generalization is established here as well, as students discuss how and when the strategy can be used. 3. Model It: In this stage the teacher models how the strategy is used, along with modeling helpful self-instructions, including problem definition, planning, strategy use, self-evaluation, coping and error correction, and self-reinforcement statements. The student also generates supportive self-statements. 4. Memorize It: The students memorize the agreed upon strategy steps, personalized self-statements, and any mnemonic if appropriate. Students can paraphrase the strategy as long as the meaning is retained. 5. Support It: The students practice using the strategy and self-instructions with teacher guidance during this stage until the learning objectives are met. Teacher and student evaluation of the strategy are ongoing. At this point the teacher may choose to use self-regulation procedures, including goal setting, self-assessment, or self-recording. Prompts and support are faded as appropriate. 6. Independent Practice: At this point, the student should use the strategy and self-instructions independently and covertly. If self-regulation procedures are in use, the instructor and students may decide to start fading them out.

We utilized the SRSD approach to teach a fourth grader with Asperger Syndrome a strategy to improve story writing ability. The strategy consisted of seven lessons that included a mnemonic device, POW, which helped the student organize the planning and writing process. The strategy reminded him to Pick My Ideas (i.e., decide what to write about), Organize My Notes (i.e., develop an advanced writing plan), and Write And Say More (i.e., expand the plan while writing). A second mnemonic - WWW, What = 2, How = 2 - reminded the student to generate notes for seven basic parts of a story during the second step of POW. Each letter of this mnemonic keyed the students to write notes for each of the following questions: Who are the main characters? When does the story take place? Where does the story take place? What do the main characters want to do? What happens when the main characters try to do it? How does the story end? How do the main characters feel? In our presentation we will explain the use of this strategy. We will describe in detail each of the seven lessons that we taught to our participant.

Considerations for Implementation

The outcomes of our study were promising: the participant's planning time increased and there were substantial improvements in holistic story quality. Although these results are encouraging, there are several important issues teachers will need to consider when incorporating strategy instruction into the writing process for children with AS. We will discuss the following considerations in our presentation.

First, a teacher should consider the limitations created by inflexible thinking patterns that may inhibit strategy acquisition. Although there is considerable evidence that the participant in our study acquired the strategy and was able to manage the strategy independently, clearly the process was not an easy one. He had preconceived ideas about how to write that interfered with the adoption of the new strategy. He also did not at first recognize the value of the new strategy, and resisted written planning despite seeing the positive effects such behaviors could have on his writing. Even after acquiring the strategy, his writings were still brief, possibly because he invested only a minimum effort in creating the story parts and did not want to elaborate or expand the description of those parts. This is fairly typical of children with AS, as they often demonstrate a lack of depth in their writing (Moore, 2002).

Second, another challenge with this population may be interfering behaviors. For example, at several times during the intervention the participant would look out the window, try to leave the room, or talk about something completely unrelated. Inattention and lack of persistence, such as these examples, are documented characteristics of children with AS (Griffin et al., 2006). When writing, one possible way to reduce these characteristics is to utilize a topic that is of interest to the child, in an attempt to gain and maintain his interest (Dahle & Gargiulo, 2004). Other techniques will be discussed in the presentation.

Because of the potential for inflexible thinking patterns and interfering behaviors, the writing environment for students with AS should be carefully crafted to include a well-rounded writing program that includes ample time for writing, specific strategy-based writing interventions, conferencing between peers and teachers, mini-lessons to increase skills, ample teacher modeling and praise, and choice in writing assignments (Saddler, 2004). In addition, children with AS would benefit from the use of a mnemonic device or other visual tool, such as the graphic organizer used in this research, to help facilitate planning prior to writing (Falk-Ross, et al., 2004; Moore, 2002).

Our study indicated that there are potential positive outcomes for the use of this strategy for children with Asperger Syndrome. As with all children with disabilities, it is important to remember that children with AS are individuals and will demonstrate different characteristics. Therefore, we suggest that this strategy will be useful for children on the Autism Spectrum who exhibit characteristics similar to the participant described in our presentation. Future research should attempt to include a greater number of participants to allow the results to be more generalizable.