When “Fidelity” Protects the Frame We Start With
Measuring with precision inside a tilted frame
In a dissertation titled Evidence-Based Autism Assessments: Utility of a School-Based Autism Evaluation Fidelity Checklist (Rose, 2025, dissertation), Liberty University PhD student Melissa Rose develops a tool to help school-based evaluators measure how closely their autism assessments align with recognized evidence-based practices. The project uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, combining qualitative input from educators and clinicians with quantitative testing to check reliability and validity. The intended benefit is to improve consistency, reduce variability and ensure evaluations follow agreed-upon best practices.
The dissertation defines fidelity as adherence to existing evidence-based autism assessment protocols, including the ADOS-2, ADI-R, developmental histories and cross-setting observations. While these measures are widely recognized, they have been shaped largely by clinician-led, deficit-oriented frameworks developed without systematic autistic participation. By measuring fidelity to these protocols, the checklist risks re-entrenching the limits of the current paradigm rather than expanding inclusivity or adapting to neurodiverse perspectives. Improving precision within a tilted frame does not straighten the frame—it simply measures more accurately inside it.
The qualitative phase drew exclusively from professional perspectives—educators and clinicians—with no documented autistic authorship, co-research or structured co-design. Lived experience can reveal communicative styles, sensory profiles and cultural factors that non-autistic evaluators may miss, particularly for students whose profiles fall outside dominant diagnostic norms. Indirect representation through professionals’ accounts is not equivalent to participatory design; research on participatory autism methods (e.g., Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019) shows that lived-experience input changes both construct definitions and measurement items.
The checklist’s focus on consistency could benefit under-resourced districts, but it does not explicitly address documented disparities in autism identification by race, gender or socioeconomic status (Maenner et al., 2023; Shaw et al., 2023). Standardizing on existing tools without adaptation for cultural and linguistic diversity risks perpetuating under-identification for historically overlooked groups. Even if the tool improves thoroughness overall, gains may not be evenly distributed unless culturally responsive practices are explicitly part of fidelity.
In Rose’s work, fidelity is defined procedurally—whether evaluators follow the checklist’s steps. There is no measure of whether the evaluation process leaves students and families informed, respected and understood. Procedural fidelity alone cannot guarantee evaluations meet autistic students’ needs in terms of sensory safety, communication access and trust-building. Supporters may argue that social validity is implied in good practice, but the instrument itself operationalizes fidelity strictly in technical terms.
Rose acknowledges the scope is procedural, not prescriptive, and that the checklist reflects one interpretation of evidence-based practice. She notes potential bias from her employment context, the exclusion of medical assessment comparisons and the inability to verify the tool’s impact on inclusivity. These caveats underscore that while the tool may aid compliance monitoring, it has not been validated for equity, inclusion or cultural responsiveness.
The checklist may improve procedural consistency in school-based autism assessments. Yet without autistic co-design, cultural adaptability or experiential outcome measures, it risks codifying a narrow, historically biased frame. The fidelity it measures is fidelity to what exists now, not necessarily to what is most equitable or valid for all autistic students. True progress would redefine fidelity to encompass whether the process itself respects, informs and accurately represents the diverse realities of autistic learners.