Autism and MR wrongly linked in the past?
November 25, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
By using untimed tests that measure non-verbal intelligence, Willamette University professor Meredyth Goldberg Edelson has found that earlier assumptions linking autism with mental retardation are “flawed assertions or contained no empirical research at all.” Today’s Oregonian reports that
Goldberg Edelson reviewed 215 studies on autism, dating to 1937, which made 223 claims about the rates of mental retardation in autism. Only 58 of those claims were supported by data, she found, and most researchers stated their results without reporting how they measured intelligence………….
“Many times, if the researchers had a child they couldn’t test, they just assumed he or she was retarded and assigned a low IQ score,” Goldberg Edelson said.
By using different tests and testing methods, Goldberg Edelson found that 293 autistic children scored a 90 (near average) on the IQ scale, and that only 19 percent of the children scored within the range of being mentally retarded. Her research has been published in Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities. She further notes that “‘I think we need to go back to the beginning and find out just what we do and do not know about autism and mental retardation.”
More than a few people have often told us that Charlie “looks smart”—-I would say, he simply is.
Add to that the challenge of using primarily visual test materials to attempt to measure the potential of a blind child — it’s been, and will continue to be, a long haul.
It seems to me that we might be seeing “clinician’s error”; kids who were both autistic and MR were probably more likely to be institutionalized and thus made easier research subjects. It’s always easier to study institutionalized populations than community-based populations; it’s also easier to wildly extrapolate conclusions from the former to the latter.
Charlie has never been formally tested for intelligence and I am already ready to take the results with several grains of salt.
Definition and classification of a learning disability defined by Newcastle University:
IQ
A high IQ doesn’t always = success according to:
EQ-I