As a way to educate the public on the different services that Iowa State offers its students with disabilities, Student Disability Resources held a lecture Tuesday on autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

This event took place in honor of Disability Awareness Month and was led by Sue Baker, a special and general education teacher at the University of Iowa, who has worked at a treatment center for autism and has served for the past 15 years as a consultant for autism in Iowa.

According to the PowerPoint presentation Baker presented, people with this disability fall under a spectrum of disorders in which people with autism tend to have a low IQ and those with Asperger’s disorder generally have a high IQ.

As a result of this spectrum, there is not one definite criterion that is used to describe them, and this affects not only their social skills but their learning and imagination skills as well.

Many of these students are not diagnosed until their middle school years with this disorder, simply because it is difficult to pinpoint what the exact problem is until a challenge is faced without a clear solution.

For example, Baker presented a scenario in which a student had a high IQ but found he had difficulty following the flow of facts that teachers gave him when he reached middle school. Baker said when this problem is faced, the key factor is to keep in mind that the problem must be determined before a solution is found.

“We need to see why his thinking is different, challenge his thinking, and help him to understand he can learn better if he does ‘blank,'” she said.

Sadly, some students even progress to the college level without a clear idea as to what their disability is and have tremendous difficulties in keeping up with the never-ending assignments. As a result, they perform poorly in their classes, and in the worst-case scenario drop out from not getting the individualized attention they are used to getting in high school.

But John Hirschman, program coordinator of the dean of the students office, said this is not necessarily a result of incompetent or uncaring teachers.

“It’s not that the teachers are not competent, there are just different laws in high school and in college,” he said.

As a way to combat this, Iowa State has a few strategies that provides students who are diagnosed with this disorder with the opportunity to get the help they need. One such strategy is a self-disclosure form, which is given to students once they specify to student services about their disability. It can be handed to the professors by the students and includes a bit of background information on them (name, year, form of disability), information on how their disability affects their learning abilities and possible strategies that could be helpful to their education.