The development of an inclusive environment in schools depends in its core on the identification and reduction of learning barriers . This results in ‘reasonable accomodation’ as UN-CRPD (Art. 24) demands.
According to recent findings in the field of autism research educational success and social participation of autistic students relies on the removal of barriers.

Our presentation will show the development of a diagnostic tool that is capable to highlight the subjective perception and potential individual affectedness by sensory and social barriers of students at school. We will also present statistical findings on the overall perception of barriers in inclusive education for autistic and non-autistic students. (We use the term ‘autistic’ with respect to its self chosen character in accordance to Walker (2015))

We follow a research approach that is based in the neurodiversity concept (Walker 2014). Autisic persons are recognized as a neuro-minority in a society that is adjusted to meet the needs of the neuro-majority (Singer 2022). For this matter we will not regard autism from clinical or pathological perspective. We much rather apply a social model of disability according to UN-CRPD. Consequently, we focus on diagnostics of barriers in the environment rather than of differences in individuals.

Furthermore, it is emphasized that the project originated as a participatory research project (Farin-Glattacker et al. 2014; Unger 2014). The project team consists of autistic and non-autistic researchers with different backgrounds. Thus the project is able to use the self-expertise of autistic scientists for a better understanding of barriers. Because of this collaboration we can benefit from a deeper understanding of the research topic, as barriers affect the everyday lives of the researchers involved in the project. Autistic expertise is used in all phases of the project, from planning, impelentation, up to publication.

For autistic persons around the world various barriers impair everyday participation. These barriers can be validly identified as will be shown in our presentation. For the project we develop questionnaires adjusted to students understanding to be used in inclusive education. To this point we were able to show differences in the individual perception between autistic and non-autistic students. More importantly we could see that all students are disturbed by barriers. However, the extent to which an individual was affected was higher for autistic, than for non-autistic students. We can derive, that autistic students have to cope with more individual barriers at school and as a result experience a higher cognitive workload for just being at school. This reduces their capabilities to participate in learning and social activities. The projects aim is to enable schools to identify and understand individual barriers. The questionnaire is intended to be a low-threshold and practical help.

This presentation will feature the development of this questionnaire from its original form of general barriers for autistic persons in society through multiple pre-tests until the validation in two phases with 19 schools and 1024 students from grades 1, 5 and 7. We will also highlight statistical findings on the overall experience of barriers in inclusive education especially for autistic students. Finally, we will reflect on our experiences with participatory research especially the benefits for a mixed methods approach like the one we conduct.

In the development of the questionnaire we used a mixed-methods design. The foundation of the project is based in a work on general barriers for autistic individuals in society (Enthinderungsselbsthilfe 2008). In this work 27 general barriers were differentiated. As a first step in our project we asked for examples on where the 27 general barriers can be found at schools in an open question online survey (n=700). The answers were analyzed through content analysis (Mayring 2010), to identify the most mentioned barriers. Based on this data, 4 most frequently mentioned examples were formulated. In the course of the evaluation, 2 of the 27 barriers were deleted, as there were overlaps. In the next phase, a first version of the questionnaire with 100 items was tested (n=2400; 366 up to 20 years). 4 examples of each of the remaining 25 barriers were presented for evaluation. A bipolar scale with 5 levels was used to answer the question: "how would this be for you?" with the two endpoints: "I think it's great" and "it's so bad that I can't do anything anymore". An exploratory factor analysis (PCA) revealed 8 factors that could be used for grouping the items and reducing their number. For this purpose, items with too low loadings and cross-loadings were excluded. For the 8 groups, reliabilities were acceptable (Cronbach alpha between 0.7 and 0.92). Item analyses showed difficulties above 0.5, which means that hardly any positive evaluations had been made. As a consequence, we shifted from a bipolar to a unipolar scale in the next survey (n=960) and "I don't mind at all" became the left endpoint. We adapted the leading question to "how much does it bother you?". Items with a discriminatory power above 0.4 were selected. For each original barrier (25), 2 items were chosen. 618 participants up to 20 years participated. Item difficulties were in a acceptable range now (0.3-0.83). We than conducted two-phase testing of the final questionnaires in 19 schools (n=1024) within one year to validate the diagnostic tool.

After the pre-testing phase we conducted the regular testing phase one year apart with the same children from 19 schools. We used physical copies of the questionnaire with 25 pages, two barriers on each page. We also illustrated the items age-appropriate in two different versions. Between the two tests we changed the wording of 6 of the items to make them more understandable for children as a result from the data we collected during the first testing period. The content of the items stayed generally the same. Through the collected data we could show an overall higher subjective barrier sensitivity for autistic students in comparison to nonautistic students. The group of students that were marked as ‘maybe autistic’ by their parents was in between. Thus we are confident that the questionnaire is capable to emphasize the subjective experience of autistic students. On the other hand all participants felt impaired by some barriers, making the questionnaire especially useful for inclusive settings, as everyone benefits from removal of specific barriers. We also saw that the average rating on the barriers differed. Some barriers like ‘specific patterns’ or ‘colored markings’ were low on average, but have a high subjective impact on some individual (autistic) students. Other barriers like “humans as a potential threat” had a high average, but still we could see a higher subjective impact for autistic students in general. We will present these findings more detailed during our presentation.

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