Special Education Assessment and Classification for Students with ASD: Perspectives of School Psychologists

Background: With autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in the United States reaching prevalence rates of 1 in 68 (Christensen et al., 2016), public schools are increasingly tasked with assessing students suspected of having ASD. However, special education data suggests many children with ASD are not classified for special education services in the area of ASD (Christensen et al., 2016; Pinborough-Zimmerman, 2012). Specifically in Georgia, 8-year-old children identified with ASD are only given an ASD classification 58% of the time. The next most prevalent eligibility category for students with ASD was significant developmental delay (SDD) at 29% (Christensen et al., 2016).

Objectives: This study examined the reasons special education classification may be established in SDD rather than ASD from the perspective of school psychologists, with a focus on geographical location (i.e., urban, suburban, rural). Further, this study examined the barriers school psychologists encounter when participating in preschool evaluations for children suspected of having ASD.

Methods: The survey for this study was developed by a team of clinicians and researchers to collect school psychologists’ assessment procedures for students with ASD. Survey items were ranked by importance from 1-5 and then averaged and ordered by importance (i.e., lower mean ranks indicating higher importance). Differences in mean item ranks across the items and between geographic locations were considered using two-way ANOVA. The survey was emailed to 557 valid email addresses with 300 surveys completed yielding a response rate of 54%. The sample was found to represent approximately 42% of school psychologists in Georgia (U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

Results: The most salient reasons of establishing eligibility in SDD rather than ASD were “Children can qualify in the area of SDD, so an ASD specific evaluation is not needed” (M = 2.51) followed by “Parents of preschool children need time to process their child's differences before an ASD eligibility is established” (M = 3.05) and “It is difficult to identify ASD in preschool age children” (M = 3.29). Geographical location did not influence how participants ranked the reasoning behind eligibility decisions (p = 0.199).

The two greatest barriers for school psychologists to participate in preschool ASD evaluations were “Time constraints and scheduling problems to obtain school psychologists” (M = 2.05) and “There are not enough school psychologists available to hire to complete these evaluations” (M = 2.46). Regardless of geographic location, no significant differences were found in the ranking of barriers (p = 0.480).

Conclusions: Across both research questions, geographical location did not appear to influence participant responding, indicating future professional development should be distributed throughout Georgia. Results of this survey may also suggest school psychologists experience apprehension giving a classification of ASD. Although receiving a SDD classification rather than an ASD classification may not impact special education service delivery, it may create diagnostic confusion and decrease access to intervention outside of the school system. Further, although autism can be reliably diagnosed as early as 2- years-old (Lord, et al., 2006), these results suggest school psychologists may encounter barriers when completing these evaluations for young children.