Examining the Strengths, Experiences, and Needs of Canadian Post-Secondary Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Post-secondary students with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represent an underserved and underrepresented population in post-secondary environments and research. A study in the United Kingdom found that post-secondary students with ASD reported a higher frequency of thoughts about withdrawing from studies and difficulties with adjustment compared to other students. However, Canadian research exploring the experiences and needs of Autistic post-secondary students is limited. Additionally, few studies have reported the perspectives of post-secondary students on the autism spectrum directly. The purpose of this study was to develop and pilot a survey designed to examine the self-reported strengths, experiences, and needs of Canadian post-secondary students with ASD. The development of this survey was guided by steering committee members with relevant lived experiences. Pilot testing was conducted with a sample of 13 individuals who self-identified with ASD and had recently attended or were currently attending college or university in Ontario. This thesis was divided into three separate studies. Study 1 described an effective application of a participatory action research approach to develop a survey. Study 2 reported preliminary findings following pilot testing of the survey. Strengths reported by participants were mainly academic, while areas of limitation included social challenges and barriers within the post-secondary environment. Participants generally reported positive sentiments regarding services accessed. Study 3 described the process for gathering feedback for survey revision from pilot participants, which highlighted a preference for quantitative questions and provided suggestions for revision for future iterations of the survey. Recommendations for future research were discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".