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Autism Spectrum Disorder. Science teaching. Teaching Strategies. Literature revision.
The socio-communicative, cognitive and sensory demands of students diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are not always considered in the implementation of the regular curriculum. In the case of science subjects, this tendency is particularly attributed to the limitations many of these students have in transposing scientific language to everyday life, which requires understanding analogies, metaphors and abstract concepts contained in scientific texts. In this scenario, it is essential to identify teaching strategies that consider the limitations and potentialities of these students, in order to make the teaching-learning process effective. Therefore, the first objective of this study was to identify, through an Integrative Literature Review (ILR), what has been produced about Science/Biology teaching for students with ASD in national and international context in the last 7 years. The second objective was to contrast the methodologies identified in the ILR with the practices that a group of 13 Science/Biology teachers, who teach students with ASD in schools of the Iguatu/CE state education network and Rio Grande do Norte state network, have used. These data were produced by means of electronic questionnaires and interviews and analyzed based on the similarity analysis technique and word cloud generated by qualitative data analysis software. The results of the RIL revealed the scarcity of such studies published in a national context. Internationally, although scarce, the researches highlighted the promising effects of the use of Evidence-Based Practices, audiovisual strategies, structuring of scientific texts, adaptation of teaching resources and active methodologies such as gamification and laboratory practices. The practices adopted by the 13 teachers, selected by convenience criteria, converge with some of the strategies described in the literature, particularly those that make use of visual resources, adaptation of scientific texts, and construction of teaching materials. However, there is an absence of empirically validated practices. In part, these results can be attributed to the lack of adequate training of the investigated teachers and lack of knowledge about the educational demands of students with ASD.