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The inclusive education framework and the increase in autism diagnoses have led to an overwhelming challenge for pre-service teachers who need to be qualified to teach all children. To test the quality of their training, the main purpose of this study was to compare 866 pre-service teachers’ knowledge, misconceptions, and gaps about autism in their first and final year at university, using the Autism Knowledge Questionnaire. The results show that fourth-year students obtained higher levels of knowledge and fewer gaps than the first-year students, although they also had more misconceptions. Special education specialists obtained significantly more knowledge and fewer misconceptions than the general education pre-service teachers. Specific training and experience had a significant influence on the knowledge and gaps, but it had no influence on the number of misconceptions. These results suggest that university preparation in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might not adequately train all future teachers.

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders often show impairments in sensory processing (SP) and higher functions. The main objective of this study was to compare SP, praxis and social participation (SOC) in four groups of children: ASD Group (n = 21), ADHD Group (n = 21), ASD+ADHD Group (n = 21), and Comparison Group (n = 27). Participants were the parents and teachers of these children who were 5–8 years old (M = 6.32). They completed the Sensory Processing Measure (SPM) to evaluate the sensory profile, praxis and SOC of the children in both the home and classroom contexts. In the home context, the most affected was the ASD+ADHD group. The ADHD group obtained higher scores than the ASD group on the Body Awareness (BOD) subscale, indicating a higher level of dysfunction. The ASD group, however, did not obtain higher scores than the ADHD group on any subscale. In the classroom context, the most affected were the two ASD groups: the ASD+ADHD group obtained higher scores than the ADHD group on the Hearing (HEA) and Social Participation (SOC) subscales, and the ASD group obtained higher scores than the ADHD group on the SOC subscale. Regarding sensory modalities, difficulties in proprioception seem to be more characteristic to the ADHD condition. As for higher-level functioning, social difficulties seem to be more characteristic to the ASD condition. Differences between the two contexts were only found in the ASD group, which could be related to contextual hyperselectivity, an inherent autistic feature. Despite possible individual differences, specific intervention programs should be developed to improve the sensory challenges faced by children with different diagnoses.

We administered a semantic verbal fluency (SVF) task to two groups of children (age range from 5 to 8): 47 diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD Group) and 53 with typical development (Comparison Group), matched on gender, chronological age, and non-verbal IQ. Four specific indexes were calculated from the SVF task, reflecting the different underlying cognitive strategies used: clustering (component of generativity and lexical-semantic access), and switching (executive component, cognitive flexibility). First, we compared the performance of the two groups on the different SVF task indicators, with the ASD group scoring lower than the Comparison Group, although the difference was greater on switching than on clustering. Second, we analyzed the relationships between the different SVF measures and chronological age, verbal IQ and non-verbal IQ. While in the Comparison Group chronological age was the main predictor of performance on the SVF task, in the ASD Group verbal IQ was the best predictor. In the children with ASD, therefore, greater linguistic competence would be associated with better performance on the SVF task, which should be taken into account in speech therapies designed to achieve improvements in linguistic generativity and cognitive flexibility.

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