This article by Maureen Niehart suggests approaches for the teacher who works with young people with Asperger's Syndrome. AS is a disorder in the autism spectrum that is observed in some gifted children. Gifted children may be very difficult to diagnose with AS because the disorder may resemble other problems such as a learning disability or simply just similar traits of a gifted child.
ABSTRACT
The author proposes that gifted children with Asperger's Syndrome may not be identified because their unusual behaviors may be wrongly attributed to either their giftedness or to a learning disability.
PUTTING THE RESEARCH TO USE
Unlike autistic children who often receive special assistance in schools, the bright student with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) may be left to manage the best he or she can. In some cases, gifted students with the disorder may not be allowed to participate in their school's gifted program because teachers do not know how to make the necessary accommodations.
Experienced interdisciplinary teams can make an accurate diagnosis of AS when they include a developmental history and when they understand the reasons for a child's behaviors.
Sensory integration therapy can be beneficial to gifted AS children whose hypersensitivity interferes with their learning or social adjustment. AS students can learn social skills with the aid of social stories, comic strip conversations, and other concrete, visual approaches.
Asperger Children
Information on the prevalence of AS is limited, but the disorder is more common in boys than in girls. AS children are similar to children with other autism spectrum disorders in that they have problems with social communication and persistent idiosyncratic interests.
Even within the subcategory of AS there is considerable variation. For instance, some perform poorly in school, while others achieve at a high level. Some have serious behavior problems, others do not. Some AS individuals demonstrate unacceptable habits, such as eating odd things, inappropriate touching, gnashing their teeth, and aggressive actions.
Similarities Between Asperger Children and Gifted Children
There seem to be at least seven characteristics common to gifted children and children with AS. These commonalities have not been verified in any controlled studies, but are pulled from the shared literature and clinical experience. For instance, verbal fluency or precocity is common to both, and both may have excellent memories. Both may evidence a fascination with letters or numbers and enjoy memorizing factual information at an early age.
Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli is also not uncommon in both groups of children. Parents of gifted and AS children alike often can tell stories of their child's adamant refusal to wear certain kinds of materials, to eat foods of a certain texture, to recoil or run at the sound of noises they find particularly abrasive, or to refuse some kinds of touch.
AS children are described as having quite a range of abilities, as are gifted children. It was Asperger's observation that all children with the disorder seem to have "a special interest which enables them to achieve quite extraordinary levels of performance in a certain area".