How do autistic students experience need‐supportive teaching in mainstream secondary schools? A joint display analysis

Abstract The international shift towards inclusive education has increased the enrolment of autistic students in mainstream schools. While mainstream education provides autistic students with valuable opportunities for their (social) development, research consistently shows that these environments struggle to fully include autistic students and address their needs. Taking self‐determination theory as a guiding framework for assessing students' basic psychological needs and how these are met by teachers, this study used a joint display analysis to combine different streams of data from secondary school autistic students ( N = 13; 6 Dutch, 7 Mexican): (1) video observations of classroom interactions analysed using a coding scheme based on self‐determination theory, (2) questionnaires about their perspectives on their lessons and interactions with teachers and (3) students' perspectives on these observations obtained through video‐stimulated recall interviews. Using joint display analyses, we compared the data from these three sources at both the individual and group level to identify patterns of convergence (agreement), complementarity (expansion) and divergence (contradictions). In doing so, we present a fine‐grained, multifaceted picture of the needs of autistic students in mainstream secondary schools and how these are met, incorporating the students' own interpretations into the analysis.