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One thing I've noticed in my 10+ years as a professor, my more allistic/neurotypical students tended to infer directions that were not included in what I gave them or told them. The more I would clarify, the more they looked for subtext that was not included.
Most commonly, they would default to the directions of what they perceived as similar exercises from past teachers/classes no matter how I clarified.
I'd have to let them make the mistake and correct them in the moment for it to have a chance and doing so would sometimes cause a system crash =/
The most common offender was true or false questions. Apparently, since determining something is true is more difficult to explain, many teachers my students had previously would only expect explanations for when the answer was false.
No matter how I asked them to explain their answer, I had to wait until they turned in their assessment and hand it back to them to tell them I needed explanations for their true/false problems—yes even the true ones.
Even that intervention was planned by the way. They would do better on the true/false questions if I intervened as soon as I noticed they left them incomplete, but it risked an unacceptable shutdown that could impact the rest of the assessment, so I intervened at the end.
By intervening at the end, students would have at least finished the remainder of the exam so that even if they had to force a restart to tackle those problems, the remainder wouldnt be impacted regardless.
The really troublesome bit though is that this means—for allistic students especially—any attempt at a progressive assessment or activity that is based on modern research and principles of learning has ALL of the baggage of past less-than-ideal activities & assessments.
Unless your class size is fairly manageable and there is a decent rapport built up, it is almost impossible to implement substantial change from what allistic students are expecting.
Not because they have "rigid thinking" or whatever they label us with—although, if the shoe fits—but because anything outside their expectations is automatically misunderstood and labeled "bad" or conflated with the closest facsimile they remember.
Meanwhile, who knows if it's primarily because we consistently are confronted with the absurdities of others, but autistic-seeming and autistic students seemed to approach the activities and assessments expecting to have to read the directions.
I've mentioned before that I believe one of the greatest boons of being autistic is the propensity we have for metacognition.
I do not know if that is more of a result of a trauma response or learned skill (having to constantly analyze WTF is happening to have any chance) or if it is a natural product of our neurology, but it's one of the greatest tools for learning.
Anyway, these are my observations and understandings, so take what you will from them.
