Autism/Excel Study
Mary Hart · 2005 · Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05) · doi:10.1145/1090785.1090811
Summary
This study investigates whether high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can learn Microsoft Excel at a level comparable to a regular education computing class, and whether the structured spreadsheet environment might support development of multi-step planning and generative thinking — cognitive skills often considered impaired in autism. Nine male students with ASD, aged 10-19, were recruited from special schools, Life Skills classrooms, and Learning Support programmes in the Pittsburgh area. None had prior Excel experience. Based on pretest scores on a problem-solving assessment (covering rule induction, planning, and arithmetic), participants were ranked and divided into treatment (5 students) and control (3 students) groups. The treatment group received eight individual tutoring sessions covering the same Excel curriculum taught in the Computer Business Applications class at a regular high school: inputting data, editing, formatting, arithmetic, graphing, and using controls. Sessions ranged from 20 minutes to over 1.5 hours and were videotaped. The control group received no Excel instruction. The planning pretest and posttest used a 'Traffic Jam Puzzle' — a parking lot grid where students had to move their car to the exit by repositioning blocking vehicles, with the system logging total moves, optimal moves, illegal move attempts, and time spent.
Key findings
All five treatment participants demonstrated mastery of most Excel topics, with total curriculum coverage ranging from 90% to 100% and independent mastery (without prompts) ranging from 53% to 98%. On the Planning Test, 80% of the treatment group improved from pretest to posttest, compared to 0% of the control group, yielding a z score of 2.19 (significant at p<0.05). Two of five participants (T1 and T2) demonstrated substantial self-initiated activities and generative thinking throughout the sessions — behaviour considered outside the expected range for individuals with autism. Examples included T1 creating categorised music genre worksheets and T2 incorporating 3D graphics and writing VBA code to display crash messages. T1 also demonstrated apparent Theory of Mind by envisioning what the instructor would know about music genres. Two others (T3 and T4) showed lesser amounts of self-directed behaviour, while T5 required substantial prompting. The study found that Excel's visual learning environment, with all relevant information displayed onscreen and ongoing visual prompts, appealed to the visual learning style characteristic of many individuals with autism while reducing the cognitive load required for organisation and planning.
Relevance
This study challenges the assumption that students with autism should be limited to rote learning approaches in computing education. The finding that some participants spontaneously engaged in creative, self-directed activities — designing their own data sets, writing code, demonstrating apparent Theory of Mind — contradicts expectations from much of the autism literature at the time. For accessibility practitioners and educators, the study provides evidence that structured computing environments like spreadsheets can serve as scaffolding for cognitive skill development, not just vocational training. The visual, organised nature of spreadsheet applications aligns well with the visual learning preferences and need for explicit structure that many individuals with autism exhibit. The significant improvement in multi-step planning is particularly noteworthy, as executive function difficulties are a core challenge in autism. The study also highlights an equity issue: students with autism are typically excluded from regular computing classes, and adapted computing curricula in special education settings are often non-existent, denying these students opportunities to develop technical skills that could lead to meaningful employment.
Tags: autism spectrum disorder · education · cognitive accessibility · adapted curriculum · executive function · generative thinking · inclusive education · digital literacy · learning disabilities