Needs-based Assessment of Students with (suspicion of) Intellectual Giftedness and/or an Autism Spectrum Disorder: Design of a Heuristic

This contribution presents the design of a theoretically grounded assessment Heuristic concerning students with (suspicion of) the coexistence of Intellectual Giftedness and an Autism Spectrum Disorder (IG+ASD). This Heuristic focuses at various cognitive and psychosocial Strengths and Weaknesses (S&Ws) and is called the S&W Heuristic. It deals with the discrepancy between the lack of a theoretically grounded coherent view on assessment and intervention issues concerning students with (suspicion of) IG+ASD and the concomitant problem of biased diagnoses in psycho-educational practice. It aims at a systematic connection between assessment and intervention-indications, by way of systematic dimensional needs-based assessment. One of its merits is that the assessment departs from IG+ASD characteristics, in-stead of IG-characteristics apart from ASD-symptoms, so that camouflage and underachievement might be detected more easily. The S&W Heuristic is explorative in nature and serves as a point of departure in theory-development and psycho-educational praxis concerning IG+ASD and may be Twice-Exceptionalities in general.