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Transitioning from high school to adulthood for persons with autism spectrum disorder

Published on April 30, 2025   37 min

A selection of talks on Neuroscience

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0:00
Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Jane Roitsch, and I'm going to be speaking with you today on the challenges of transitioning from high school to adulthood for persons with autism spectrum disorder. I have my degree in speech language pathology, and currently, I'm an associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. I'm excited for this amazing opportunity because as a speech language pathologist, when you have someone believe in you enough to let you speak to your passion, it means a lot.
0:35
So I mentioned a little bit about myself. How I got interested in working with individuals with autism is that's the nature of a lot of what you do as a speech language pathologist. I learned a lot about the characteristics of persons with autism. I'm going to share them with you today. Some of the challenges that I've seen in working with people on the spectrum who have tried to transition from high school into the workplace or into college. I have some case studies I'd like to share with you. I'm going to speak about current research, and then we will end with some success stories and some suggested support services, and then speak to future directions as we move forward.
1:19
I became really interested in the idea of helping people transition from high school into the workplace and into college during the pandemic. As I mentioned, I've been a speech pathologist for more than 25 years, and I've worked with a lot of individuals. One of the things I found interesting was speaking with the mother of one of my clients who was on the spectrum and had some challenges when it came to adjusting to the pandemic as we all did. I grabbed a couple of my colleagues, and we put together a paper speaking to the impact of this abrupt transition from attending school face-to-face to participating in online programs due to the pandemic. So I spoke with the student's mom over the phone and in the study we found some really interesting things. Four themes emerged from the interview that we did. Three of those included the adjustments required to make changes in routines, but also in roles. Instruction was challenged as well as the social interactions. But the final theme that came out of this interview involved the benefits, but also the challenges that emerged with the following transition from online learning for students with autism. During the global pandemic, there were understandable challenges, but the practical implications of what we found was that a lot of times, especially for this student, he benefited from some aspects of working online and doing his homework online. But one of the hardest things that he had to deal with was the adjustment to the schedules. It highlighted a little bit of the information that I'm going to be talking about as I move forward. We're going to talk now about understanding the history of autism, what we know and where we are now. Next, I'm going to talk about

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Transitioning from high school to adulthood for persons with autism spectrum disorder

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