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Towards ‘A Level Playing Field’: A Participatory Study of Autistic University Students’ Experiences with Academic Support in England

Dexter, Sam; Umagami, Kana; Quinnell, Sarah-Louise; Surrey, Alice; Crane, Laura; (2024) Towards ‘A Level Playing Field’: A Participatory Study of Autistic University Students’ Experiences with Academic Support in England. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education 10.1080/1034912X.2024.2317475. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

It is a university’s responsibility to ensure their autistic students are supported academically. While current research gives us an indication of how universities provide this support, it reveals very little about the experiences that autistic students themselves have with such support. In this research, we took a participatory approach, via a collaboration between autistic and non-autistic staff and students, to examine the experiences that autistic students have with their academic support. Twenty-eight autistic students from across England completed an online survey, and content analysis of this data found that mentoring and changes to exam arrangements were the two most commonly reported supports. Nine autistic students from one English university then took part in the semi-structured interviews and, through reflexive thematic analysis of the data, three themes were generated. First, that students appreciate their academic supports; second that support is very dependent on staff involvement; and third that responsibility for academic support falls on the student. These findings demonstrate the academic supports that autistic students consider effective, as well as where they feel barriers still exist that prevents them from fully accessing their support.

Type: Article
Title: Towards ‘A Level Playing Field’: A Participatory Study of Autistic University Students’ Experiences with Academic Support in England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/1034912X.2024.2317475
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2024.2317475
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords: Academic; autism; higher education; participatory research; support
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10158258
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