The effectiveness of motivational techniques used by general education, elementary, middle school teachers to teach children with high functioning autism (HFA) and asperger's syndrome (AS) to read

Children with HFA and AS can exhibit behaviors that are not ideal for literacy instruction or an educational setting. These behaviors might appear to be inconsistent, manipulative, oppositional, distractible, dependent, and unfocused. Since these children are at risk due to their difficulty of language acquisition, it would be imperative to teach these children to read. Before a child can read, their behavior should be appropriate to gain literacy instruction. This study examined general education, elementary, and middle school teachers’ perceptions of effectiveness of the motivational techniques they used during literacy instruction with children with HFA and AS. An electronic-anonymous survey was sent out to teachers in 16 school districts in Texas. There was a total of 350 surveys collected, a portion of each survey was utilized for this study. The results demonstrated that daily use of verbal praise and daily use of token boards and tokens were used most frequently. A regre