https://phys.org/news/2018-11-collaborative-approach.html

It was Drs. Etzkorn and Zhang who initially brought the issue to Dr. Meade's attention. "About a year ago, they reached out to me about an increase they had seen in the number of students who were struggling in the class setting," she says. "Whether it was interrupting the professor or not being able to vary their thought process, they would seem to get stuck on one thing and not let it go." Dr. Meade, whose research focus is on autism and behavioral disorders and who serves as the director of the UAH Regional Autism Network, suspected the cause might be an impairment of social skills, particularly given the professors' field. "It's possible those who don't have strong social skills or are introverts might be more likely to choose majors like computer science, where their social skills aren't going to be tapped so readily," she says. "So we wanted to see how many people would need intervention."

The three decided to partner on a pilot study titled "The Missing Element: A Discussion of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Computer Science," which they presented earlier this year at the American Society for Engineering Education's Southeastern Section Conference in Daytona, Fla. Students in the professors' class who consented to the study were anonymously screened for autism using Gilliam Autism Rating Scale-3 protocols and then scored using the autism index. "The results caught me very off guard," says Dr. Meade. "More than 80 percent scored either 'probably' or 'very likely' on the autism spectrum. And even though Huntsville is known to have a higher rate of autism, mirroring Silicon Valley, we weren't expecting that."