The aim of this study is to examine interactional skills and behaviour of female students with ASD (or possible ASD) in the Finnish comprehensive school context. The prevalence of ASD is about one percent at the population level (Fombonne, Quirke & Hagen, 2011). However, ASD affects the males at a higher frequency than females (Matson & Kozlowski, 2011). It is suggested that smaller ratios for females are partly due to underdiagnosing females but the research focusing on females with ASD is scarce (Lai, Lombardo, Auyeung, Chakrabarti, & Baron-Cohen, 2015). It might also be possible that the key screening instruments (ADI, ADI-R, ADOS, ADI-G) used to detect autism do not sort out the females on the spectrum accurately enough: most of the screening instruments are developed in tests where most of the participants are male (Kopp & Gillberg, 2011). Females (with possible ASD) in general may have better social skills, which may hide autistic features (Lai, Baron-Cohen, & Buxbaum, 2015). In our research project, we utilize the expertise of highly educated Finnish special education teachers (N = 50) concerning the assessments of student behaviour and encounters with challenging students. The appearances of spontaneous communication is under scrutiny (Rämä, Kontu, & Pirttimaa, 2014). The research includes an empirical design with observations, comprehensive questionnaires and interviews based on social, interactional and communicative themes rising partly from the International classification of functioning, disability and health (ICF) and partly from the criteria of ASD (DSM-5, ICD-10). We argue that experienced special education teachers are able to differentiate subtle behavioural features between male and female students with (possible) ASD (see also Takala & Astrid, 2014). We expect that the results reveal differences between the official ASD criteria and the perceptions of the social, interactional and communicative features of the female students viewed by teachers’ practical perspective. With the expected results it is possible to modify existing assessment instruments more accurate considering the traits highlighted in females

Fombonne, E., Quirke, S., & Hagen, A. (2011). Epidemiology of pervasive developmental disorders. In D. G. Amaral, G. Dawson, & D. H. Geschwind (Eds.), Autism Spectrum Disorders, pp. 90– 111. Oxford University Press. Kopp, S., & Gillberg, C. (2011). The Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ)-Revised Extended version (ASSQ-REV): An instrument for better capturing the autism phenotype in girls? Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 2875–2888. Lai, M. C., Baron-Cohen, S., & Buxbaum, J. D. (2015). Understanding autism in the light of sex/gender. Editorial. Molecular Autism, 6:24. Lai, M. C., Lombardo, M. V., Auyeung, B., Chakrabarti, B., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). Sex gender differences and autism. Journal of American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(1), 11–24. Matson, J. L., & Kozlowski, A. M. (2011). The increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 5, 418–425. Rämä, I., Kontu, E., & Pirttimaa, R. (2014). Communicative spontaneity in autism: exploring supportive prompts in an educational context, European Journal of Special Needs Education, 29:2, 184–199. Takala, M., & Astrid, A. (2014). Special Education in Swedish and Finnish schools – Seeing the Forest or the Trees? British Journal of Special Education, 41(1), 59–81.