A focus on expanding services for students with autism and ADHD at St. Cloud State University has earned three clinical mental health counseling graduate students recognition in this year’s Huskies Showcase with a winning reflection and a finalist designation in the poster presentation category.
Huskies Showcase is being presented virtually on a volunteer basis for students, faculty and staff to interact with the projects on D2L Brightspace. Finalists and Husky Compact dimension winners were named this April. No awards will be presented for oral or poster presentation beyond finalist designations due to limitations of the virtual format.
Candice Zehner, Claire Tollefsrud and September Prushek won the award for Best Our Husky Compact Reflection in the Seek and Apply Knowledge dimension for their presentation “Expanding Support for Students with Autism and ADHD at St. Cloud State University”. Their faculty mentor is Tina Sacin. Their project was also named a finalist for research in the poster presentation category.
The dimensions come from Our Husky Compact. The six dimensions embody the essential and cross-cutting attributes of a St. Cloud State University education. These attributes are developed over time and across and beyond the curriculum.
Presentation Abstract:
Your freshman year of college is filled with an array of confusing events, expectations, and life transitions. What will be your program of study? How will you make friends? How will you keep friends? Who am I? How do I pass my classes? It is hard for anyone coming into college to tackle so many stressful events. It becomes increasingly difficult if you are someone with a learning disability and/or social implications.
Currently at Saint Cloud State University there are 673 students that utilize Student Accessibility Services. 49 students of which are diagnosed with Autism (ASD) and 210 students diagnosed with ADHD. In a U.S. study it was shown that only 17% of people with ASD will attend a 4-year college and only 20% will graduate from college. This is not to say that these students do not have the abilities to be successful in college, but it does question how we shape our universities to be inclusive and supportive to people with these disabilities.
The research we present was pulled from the general needs of people with autism nationally combined with the needs that our SCSU students with ADHD and autism have identified as being central needs of support and assistance within college universities. We plan to expand this research in the Fall of 2020 to implement a new and research-based 8-week support and psycho-educational group for people with autism and ADHD. We hypothesize that students with autism and ADHD at SCSU that participate in this group, will identify as feeling greater support from the university and will have better performance outcomes.
Reflection:
Expanding Support for Students with Autism and ADHD at St. Cloud State University, emerged from a need within Student Accessibility Services (SAS) at St. Cloud State University.
As a Graduate Assistant in SAS, I have met with multiple students with ADHD and Autism to focus on skills in time management and finding resources on campus. While meeting with these students, many of them identified difficulties with relationships in college and executive functioning skills. Many students expressed frustrations with communicating and building relationships with professors, peers, and people in professional environments.
Some students with Autism and ADHD expressed struggling with organization, time management, note taking skills, and studying. With the multitude at which students with ADHD and Autism were coming into SAS with these similar problems it was clear to me that difficulties with executive functioning and relationship building were common struggles within these populations. We started our research by exploring research literature regarding students with Autism and ADHD in college.
It is also highly beneficial for students with similar disabilities to be in groups where they can learn from one another’s experiences and build connections on campus with people who understand their barriers. Executive functioning skills can also be taught in one on one situations but learning these skills in a psycho-educational group provides timely and efficient results for the student and university. It also provides an opportunity to build social connections with peers in working groups. With all these benefits of groups, it makes the most sense to provide a support/psycho-educational group for people with Autism and ADHD.
Knowledge from existing literature served as a good start to learning about this population’s needs, however our research was not complete without assessing the specific needs of students at St. Cloud State University. Student Accessibility Services, along with Communication Sciences and Disorders, CAPS and Applied Behavior Analysis departments all work with people with these disorders on campus.
The question is what specific services would a group that we provide give to the needs of these students that weren’t already being satisfied by what is already offered on campus?
To seek the answer to this question, we proposed the idea of a focus group for people with ADHD and Autism at St. Cloud State University. Our research team facilitated 2 focus groups where we had intentional conversations exploring resources and needs assessments for people with ADHD and Autism at this University.
We transcribed and analyzed this information to assess what specific resources this population is seeking. The focus groups proved our hypothesis correct in that people with ADHD and Autism are seeking resources on campus to connect, build social relationships and provide assistance with academics. We found that many of the resources that St. Cloud State University currently offers addresses the need for academic assistance, but there is still a large need for social relationship building.
With this acquired information, our team is working with the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program (CMHC) and Student Accessibility Services to provide support groups within the clinic for practicum students in the CMHC program. This will allow students in the CMHC program to gain experience in their field, while people with ADHD and Autism will have a place to feel included and to learn and practice social relationships.
While this support group takes place we plan to continue our research by providing more focus groups each month to gather more data on the needs of the ADHD and Autism population. It is with both with the knowledge we acquire from these focus groups and the research literature on successful groups for people with ADHD and Autism, that we plan to expand our project into creating curriculum for a researched-based psycho-educational/support group for people with ADHD and Autism in the Fall of 2020.
Our goal of creating a research-based curriculum for this group is so that it can be passed on for future group leaders and to build a connection between the CMHC program and SAS. With this connection the psycho-educational/support group will be sustainable and will have clear direction for future leaders. The involvement in this research project has opened up many educational and professional doors for our research team, the CMHC program, and SAS.
As a research team, we have had the opportunity to network with existing and evolving programs to help them integrate their missions of providing helpful tools for students on campus. This research project has furthered professional development for ourselves in learning how to advocate for the community, seek and apply knowledge, improve research methodology, and think creatively. We are assisting the CMHC program by providing an opportunity for practicing clinicians to develop skills in working with clientele of diverse disabilities and disorders to use in their future professions.
We are benefiting the students on campus with ADHD and Autism to have a place to practice and build social relationships while being surrounded by a strong, supportive and inclusive environment. This research project has been an open door to exceptional experience and knowledge seeking within multiple dimensions. We are honored to have the privilege to carry out this research here at St. Cloud State University and we are excited to continue to build this research project with our goals in mind.
