Eliana Grossman

CUNY Graduate Center | CUNY · Program in Psychology

Introduction Autistic people face systemic barriers to fair employment. Informal learning may promote the self-determination transition-age autistic youth need to overcome and/or transform these barriers. This report focuses on the iterative process of developing video game design workshops guided by feedback from autistic students about instructio...

Background Autistic people are often skilled with computers and drawn to STEM fields (Wei et al., 2013) yet encounter difficulties obtaining employment (Shattuck et al., 2012). Strategies to help neurodivergent youth engage with STEM curricula to build employment-related skills are sorely needed. Training for staff who facilitate such programs shou...

Background Autistic people often face barriers obtaining meaningful employment (Burgess & Cimera, 2014; Shattuck et al., 2012). Although not all autistic people are interested in STEM fields (Cheriyan et al., 2021), some have STEM interests and strengths that are well aligned with workforce needs (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015; Krzeminska, & Ha...

This study focused on if and how students’ self-reported engagement and teacher ratings of students’ engagement is associated with video games created by autistic youths in a 2-week online game design workshop as well as if the individual differences of students affect the games created. Researchers used surveys and Cambridge Brain Science tasks to...

Background: Parents may wait to tell a child they are autistic until they feel the child is “ready,” leading some autistic people to learn they are autistic years after their diagnosis (Smith et al., 2018). Parents often express concerns that their child will not understand the diagnosis, that it could confer stigma, and/or harm their child’s menta...

This study examines the relationship between emotions about stimming behaviors and special interests (SIs) felt by autistic high school and college students. Twenty-three autistic students who participated in a game design and employment workshop completed a self-report survey. Positive feelings about both stimming and SIs were reported, but less f...

The gap between autistic people’s potential and their employment outcomes is a pressing societal issue. This report focuses on the first workshops in a three-year-long NSF-funded program of research that seeks to empower autistic youth to move toward their dream jobs by helping educators more effectively guide them. In the Summer of 2021, educators...

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions provides a state-of-the-art review of research on the role of emotions in creativity. This volume presents the insights and perspectives of sixty creativity scholars from thirteen countries who span multiple disciplines, including developmental, social, and personality psychology; industrial and org...

In this talk, we explore factors that may shape how autistic young people think about autism, including experiences being discriminated against, trainings we have developed to reduce autism stigma in various cultural contexts (highlighting strengths of trainings developed in collaboration with autistic people), challenges with participatory researc...

This poster shares some of what we learned during the first summer of our game design workshops for autistic teenagers/young adults at Tech Kids Unlimited. In the first summer, we conducted two week-long workshops, revising the curriculum based on what we learned from the first workshop before conducting the second workshop. In the first summer, we...

In this talk, we described the process of developing learning objectives for our upcoming online Game Design and Employment Workshop at Tech Kids Unlimited (TKU) based on guidance from a participatory group of neurodivergent youth and scholars and what we learned last summer when conducting our first game design workshops for this NSF-funded study....

In their talk, the speakers will introduce the neurodiversity movement and illustrate the participatory, neurodiversity-aligned approaches that are central to most of their current research. Their talk will highlight recently completed and ongoing projects including a comparison of a participatory and a non-participatory Autism training for college...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on our lives with individuals experiencing a wide range of emotions. While much attention has been placed on promoting physical health to control the coronavirus, far less attention has been placed on promoting mental health and well-being. There are well-known reports of individuals gravitating towar...

Discussions about diversity and representation can empower neurodivergent young people to appreciate their own and others’ unique identities. We will share what we have learned through navigating discussions about social justice within two programs for autistic young people: NSF-funded game design workshops for autistic youth at Tech Kids Unlimited...

The workshop, entitled “Is Universal Design Enough? Learning from the Neurodiversity Movement How to Engage Diverse Learners”, was sponsored by Transformative Learning in the Humanities. In our workshop, we used the neurodiversity framework to collaboratively develop strategies to more effectively reach our diverse students by demonstrating and fos...

The present study was inspired by Barron’s (1963) description of creative individuals as “occasionally crazier, yet adamantly saner” than the general population. As suggested by this description, we hypothesized that some individuals embody a pattern of both psychological vulnerabilities and resources and that this pattern is more likely to be pres...