I have been teaching a student with Asperger syndrome for an AS level in ICT. When the student started I noted that as soon as he came across a question on an exam paper that he couldn't answer he would clam up and get very frustrated, making him unable to answer the rest of the questions on the paper. I explained to him that the order was not important and although he accepted this, he said he couldn't do it in an exam.
With his support tutor David Porter, we cut up the exam paper and allowed him to sort the questions into 3 piles: CAN, THINK and NO. This had a significant improvement on his achievement except that the exam board would not allow us to do this. I spent ages racking my brains for another solution; colour coding with pens, using a traffic light system. Green for CAN DO, then orange for THINK and red for NO. He would then answer all the questions marked green first, then the orange and then the red. The effect of this method was that he was actually able to answer some of the red questions as well. This made a considerable improvement on achievement and gave him confidence in exams; instead of going in worried he was calm and composed. I developed other strategies for helping him deal with answering questions since he found the questions vague (however they were expecting him to apply knowledge and he has difficulty in doing this).
I hope this information will improve the achievement rates for other people with Asperger syndrome.
Written by Fiona Green, teacher