Grit, revisited

This past weekend at the Festival of Education in Potomac, Maryland, I had the pleasure of attending David Steiner's fascinating and highly unsettling talk on the state of American education. Among other things, his talk included a list of the Great Distractors:

• Critical thinking
• Growth mindset
• Grit
• Social and emotional learning
• Metacognition
• Twenty-first century skills
• Creative Thinking

To the extent that any of these items hold any truths, he noted, these are truths that 23 centuries of educational practice have long ago brought to light. Only in the U.S. do we think we need to (1) reinvent them and (2) exaggerate them until they're nothing more than... Great Distractors.

One item on the list reminded me of this old OILF post, which I hereby resuscitate:

If we define success in life by public acclaim and genius awards, then one approach is to come up with an idea that is simultaneously ground-breaking and accurate. Short of that, you can always come up with an idea that is, depending on how you characterize it, sometimes ground-breaking, and sometimes accurate. This is how it works. Pick a startling "new" idea, whether it's, say, that human intelligence consists of Seven Intelligences, or that some non-cognitive factor, say Grit, is one the biggest determiners of success. Proclaim it loud and clear. Give Ted Talks; win public acclaim and Macarthur genius grants. Then, as the real world (or the eduworld) starts gleefully enacting your ideas, and as certain aspects of those enactments risk looking silly, start qualifying what you said, at least to certain audiences. I never said that there were exactly 7 intelligences; I never said that these intelligences were discrete entities; or, We don't really know how to teach or measure grit; Grit is only just one of many factors that determine success. Then, even when someone in your field raises empirical challenges, you're exactly where you want to be. Consider Marcus Crede's take on Angela Duckworth's claims about grit, as recently reported on NPR:

"My overall assessment is that grit is far less important than has commonly been assumed and claimed," says the lead author, Marcus Crede, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University. "And it doesn't tell us anything that we don't already know."

For example, Duckworth states that:

Cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average on the Grit–S were 99% more likely to complete summer training.

As NPR notes:

That sure sounds like a big win for grit. But, as Crede points out, in fact what happened is that 95 percent of all cadets make it through Beast Barracks, while 98 percent of the very "grittiest" candidates made it through.

In other words:

it's the odds of making it through that improved by 99 percent. Most laypeople, though, would interpret "99% more likely" as meaning that your chances of getting through bounced, say, from 40 percent to 80 percent. Not by 3 percentage points

In contrast to what Duckworth has proclaimed to the public, Crede's meta-analysis finds the relationship between grit and academic success "only modest." His analysis found an overall correlation of 0.18, looking at papers by Duckworth and others.

This compares to a much higher correlation of 0.50 between, say, SAT scores and performance in college.

Further undermining Duckworth's public proclamations is this:

In the various studies Crede looks at, conscientiousness scores and grit scores are very highly correlated — between 80 and 98 percent. Therefore, he calls grit a case of "old wine in new bottles."

This matters, because a major implication of Duckworth's work is that grit is a skill. Schools and districts around the country are currently working hard on creating curricula for grit, and even accountability tests to measure it.

But, psychologists say conscientiousness isn't a skill. It's a trait — driven by some unknowable combination of genetics and environment. It can change, typically improving as children grow up, but it's not necessarily amenable to direct instruction. Nor would we necessarily wish it to be.

"I think as a parent I would feel uncomfortable if my daughter came home and said, 'My school is changing my personality,' " Crede says.

Complicating matters, however, is that Duckworth is saying different things to different audiences. First, there's academia and skeptics at NPR:

Duckworth's own numbers [for the correlation between grit and academic success], in a paper published in 2007, are only slightly higher [than Crede's]: 0.20.

Fundamentally, she told NPR Ed, she doesn't disagree with Crede here... She says her findings of the independent impact of grit are what personality psychologists would put in the "smallto-medium" range.

 But then there's the general public, as addressed, for example, in Duckworth's 2013 Ted Talk, where:

she presents grit as a powerful, even unique factor: "One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit."

Besides saying different things to different audiences, there's a second trick: let the exaggerations of your supporters go uncorrected:

The cover blurb on Duckworth's book by Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, states, "Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success, but Duckworth is the one who found it."

 Naturally,

Duckworth says she never tried to oversell her findings, and has always tried to be "clear and honest."

 Nor do I want to oversell my ideas. I'm not saying that every sometimes ground-breaking, sometimes accurate idea will result in fame, fortune, and Macarthur genius awards. To really be successful, the idea has to be something the public really wants to hear. If I were to "discover" that the one and only way to achieve communication breakthroughs in autism is through forty plus hours per week of intensive direct instruction in language plus intensive language practice, I doubt anyone would pay attention.

One indication that Duckorth has told the public exactly what it wants to hear is that, as of this writing, only four media outlets show up on Google News as having picked up this troubling counter-narrative. I'm guessing that Duckworth is still exactly where she wants to be, and that the public, and the eduworld in particular, are still hearing--and enacting-- exactly what they want to.

Social Deficits Correlate with Motor Deficits: Commentary on some recent “research” cited by the pro-FC organization United for Communication Choice.

 (Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommuniction.org.)

In a recent post, I critiqued the curious “facts” listed on United for Communication Choice (UCC)’s facts page. In what may be my final post on UCC, I’ll now take a look at the two most recent articles listed on its research page.

What distinguishes UCC from all other pro-FC websites is its compilation of all (or nearly all) the pro-FC, peer-reviewed publications out there—or at least publications that look peer-reviewed and can be interpreted by at least some FC proponents as FC-friendly. In all, it lists around 175 publications. We at FacilitatedCommunication.com have gone through them all and have included most of what are purportedly the more FC-friendly articles, along with our commentary, in the Research section of this website. We’ve also critiqued some of the most FC-friendly (or purportedly FC-friendly) articles in more detail here in the blog section. But before I add two more articles to that last, I want to place them in their broader context relative to UCC.

UCC’s raison-d’être appears to have been the pending 2018 position statements of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) against FC and its variants (Rapid Prompting Method or RPM; Spelling to Communicate or S2C). Indeed, another page on its website contains a compilation of about 130 letters written to ASHA in 2018 urging it to reconsider these statements. Included are letters by parents of individuals who are subjected to FC, RPM, and S2C; letters generated via FC, RPM, and S2C; and letters by such luminaries as Elizabeth Vosseller, who re-branded RPM as S2C; Vaishnavy Sarathy of the S2C documercial Spellers; and veteran autism echolalia expert Barry Prizant. But five years have passed since ASHA’s position statements, and ASHA (thankfully) hasn’t caved.

Perhaps this explains the lack of recent additions to UCC’s research page.  Some of its listings date back to the 1990s; the overwhelming are from 2000 onwards. But there’s been nothing since 2022, and only two from 2022: the two articles to which I now turn.

One of these is Heyworth et al. (2022). It reviews the research for and against FC and, in the words of the abstract, “argue[s] that the current dismissal of FC is rooted in ableist and outdated approaches.” As I argued in my critique of this article Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, the authors base their argument on:

[I]naccurate assumptions about augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), conversational pragmatics, message passing tests, cognitive testing, cueing, recent discoveries about autism, and/or the empirical research on FC.

I also explain how the authors depend on circular reasoning (FCed messages that are cited as evidence that FCed messages are valid), claims that are not supported by the studies cited as support, “biased characterizations of FC critics,” and “biased takes on key concepts pertaining to FC and the rights of people with disabilities.” If you’re interested in accessing this paper and are unable to do through an academic institution, please let me know.

The final paper to appear on UCC’s research page is a paper entitled “Gross Motor Impairment and Its Relation to Social Skills in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Two Meta-analyses” (Wang et al., 2022). Though this paper is less obviously FC-friendly than Heyworth et al., any paper that appears to support the notion that autism is a motor disorder can be construed as FC-friendly. As Douglas Biklen realized back in 1989 when he first observed FC in Australia and then introduced it to the U.S., redefining autism as some sort of motor disorder instead of a disorder involving impaired communication serves two FC-friendly purposes. It accounts for the sophisticated communicative content of FCed messages, and it explains the need for the physical support for typing that is provided by facilitators.

On closer inspection, however, Wang et al. is not as FC-friendly as proponents might hope. On one hand, “aggregating data from 114 studies representing 6,423 autistic and 2,941 NT individuals,” the researchers establish, in their first meta-analysis, that there is a “significant overall deficit in gross motor skills in ASD.” But since typing is a fine motor skill, difficulties with gross motor skills do not explain the need for facilitation during typing. Unless, that is, one were to argue, as Nicoli et al. (2023) do, that facilitation addresses gross motor difficulties. Nicoli et al.’s paper, which I critiqued in a previous post, argues that tactile feedback from facilitators might help facilitated individuals with postural control—a gross motor function—during facilitation. The idea is that difficulty with postural control is so distracting for autistic non-speakers that they are unable to communicate by typing. Unless, of course, they are facilitated.

Setting aside the serious flaws in Nicoli et al. that I critiqued earlier, there’s another problem with the gross motor justification for facilitation: namely, findings from Wang et al.’s second meta-analysis. This one, “synthesizing data from 21 studies representing 654 autistic individuals,” found “a modest but significant overall correlation between gross motor and social skills in ASD.” UCC, excerpting this statement, seems to consider it an FC-friendly finding. In some sense it is: as Wang et al. point out, since social deficits are considered core symptoms of autism, a correlation of gross motor deficits with social deficits lends some support to the idea that motor deficits could be considered core symptoms as well. Indeed, if gross motor deficits turn out to be the underlying causes of social deficits, then gross motor deficits could replace social deficits as core symptom for autism.

As possible ways in which gross motor deficits could cause social deficits, the authors propose that these:

could contribute to the development of social impairment over time by altering the ways in which autistic individuals perceive and interact with others. Early changes in posture and locomotion have been tied to changes in the social information that children see… and the frequency and quality of their social interactions… and may thereby alter children’s opportunities for social learning… [M]otor coordination may also affect the quality of social interaction... For instance, deficits in basic motor skills may constrain interpersonal coordination of movements during social interaction… [S]chool-age children with poorer motor coordination skills participate in fewer activities, engage in less social play, and choose more socially isolated activities than those with more advanced coordination skills.

But they also note:

[T]he converse relationship may also be true, such that social deficits contribute to the development of gross motor impairment… Early social differences associated with ASD may limit children’s participation in activities that would otherwise allow them to practice gross motor skills.

In addition:

Another possible explanation is that the association between gross motor and social deficits in ASD is the result of common neurobiological mechanisms (such that social deficits and motor deficits are expression of a common source), rather than direct causal effects of one domain on another.

As the authors conclude, “Further research is needed to test the causality and directionality of this relationship.”

But even if gross motor deficits were to replace social deficits as defining symptoms of autism, there’s still a huge problem for FC: namely, the correlation between the degree of social difficulties and the degree of gross motor difficulties. That correlation rules out the possibility of claiming, as Biklen did, that autism only involves motor difficulties, and not communication difficulties. Gross motor problems that are significant enough to warrant facilitation are also significant enough to entail significant social difficulties. Those social difficulties, in turn, would undermine both the acquisition of language (see our discussion here), and the social use of language that is the basis for effective communication. In particular, it would undermine the communication skills that are prerequisite for all those FCed messages that, proponents claim, are somehow authored by those with significant motor impairments—for example (to cite just one of hundreds of examples), “The irony of a nonspeaking autistic encouraging you to use your voice is not lost on me.”

The connection of gross motor deficits, via social deficits, to language and communication deficits recalls another paper I discussed in an earlier post—namely, findings by Yanru Chen, presented at this year’s INSAR conference and described in the INSAR’s Autism Research Review International, about the small subgroup of minimal speakers who have larger-than-expected receptive language skills (comprehension skills) given their minimal expressive language skills (speaking skills). In this subgroup:

[M]otor skills emerge as the only significant factor predicting the discrepancies between receptive and expressive language above and beyond all other factors. And those with better motor skills are more likely to have much better receptive language than expressive language.

Thus, the degree of motor skills deficits correlates not just with the degree of social skills deficits, but also the degree of the deficits in language comprehension. And given that you can’t be the author of a message that uses words you don’t understand, the degree of motor skills deficits also correlates with the how plausible it is that a particular autistic individual was the author of a particular message that was FCed out of him. The greater his or her motor skills deficits, the less likely he or she is to be the true author. At least, that’s what the research—including the purportedly FC-friendly research—is telling us.

REFERENCES:

Beals, K. P. (2022) Why we should not presume competence and reframe facilitated communication: a critique of Heyworth, Chan & Lawson, Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 16:2, 66-76, DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2022.2097872

Chen, Y. (2023). Nonverbal kids with ASD may understand much more language than they produce. Autism Research Review International, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2023.

Heyworth, M., Chan, T., & Lawson, W. (2022), Perspective: Presuming Autistic Communication Competence and Reframing Facilitated Communication, Frontiers in Psychology, 13:864991

Nicoli G, Pavon G, Grayson A, Emerson A and Mitra S (2023) Touch may reduce cognitive load during assisted typing by individuals with developmental disabilities. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 17:1181025. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2023.1181025

Stone, W. L., & Yoder, P. J. (2001). Predicting spoken language level in children with autism spectrum disorders. Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 5(4), 341–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361301005004002

Wang, L. A. L., Petrulla, V., Zampella, C. J., Waller, R., & Schultz, R. T. (2022). Gross motor impairment and its relation to social skills in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and two meta-analyses. Psychological bulletin, 148(3-4), 273–300. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000358

From Frankenstein to Facilitated Communication

What do Frankenstein and Facilitated Communication have in common? Both involve miraculous stories of word learning. 

In one case you have a nonverbal child who, supplied with some sort of facilitated communication medium, suddenly evinces neurotypical vocabulary (not to mention neurotypical grammar and conversational skills). In the other case you have a humanoid monster mastering his first language by overhearing, through the window of his hovel, conversations between his unwitting nextdoor neighbors.

The facilitated child starts writing poetry and novels; the humanoid listener reads Plutarch and Milton. As I noted earlier in connection with the former: You watch these children’s eyes (to the extent that the videos let you), and you see little or no evidence of focused or coordinated eye gaze; you see eyes that seem to flit all over the place, or to stare upwards or outwards at nothing in particular (and often not at the keyboard that their fingers are pushing against). 

Could all this be explained by sensory-motor problems rather than socio-cognitive impairments? But then you have to ask: how can kids whose eyes seem not to be able to track pointing gestures or eye gazes, and who would seem therefore to have no way to deduce what people’s words refer to when uttered, have managed to learn the words for the various things in their everyday environments? Not to mention the more advanced words that have somehow entered their soliloquies, poetry, and memoirs: words like “assume” and “knowingly”? 

More advanced learners can pick up words from texts alone, but to jumpstart the process you (however neurotypical or neuroatypical you are) need real-world connections. Before you can read for meaning, that is, you need a critical mass of basic vocabulary that you’ve actively linked to the outside world. And linking those basic words to the outside world--in other words to their meanings--requires of you (however neurotypical or neurountypical you are) a certain threshold of sustained and appropriately targeted auditory and visual attention. 

It’s also essential to be actively engaged with those using language around you. Overhearing language on TV, it turns out, doesn’t do much for language novices; what’s essential is shared space, shared attention, and the ability to look up at the speaker’s eyes and then over to what he or she is looking at. Children with autism, even if they share space with language users, often don’t share attention. They may mis-map the words they hear to whatever they themselves are attending to, not noticing that the speaker is looking elsewhere, thereby mis-learning the word meanings. 

Language takes off outside of 3D shared space and shared attention only after you learn a critical mass of words in your first language. Picture books, and books with illustrations, diagrams, and maps, and glossaries, provide a crucial bridge over to pure prose. Once there, you can learn troves of new words from the surrounding words you already know. Another bridge is your first language: via glossaries, translations, and explanations, it can jumpstart you into a second language. But for total language novices, printed words and overheard words are not enough. Fairy tales aside, that is.

A critique of United for Communication Choice’s “facts” page

 Cross posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.

I recently stumbled upon the “facts” page of the pro-FC organization United For Communication Choice and decided an annotated critique was in order. United for Communication Choice appears not to have conducted much activity on its site or elsewhere in the last year, but for a while it kept up a repository of pro-FC research, much of which we’ve critiqued here. In addition, it was a hub for criticism of a position statement against FC by the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), and many of its “facts” are inspired by that position statement.

In what follows, I excerpt the most problematic of these purported facts (preserving the original boldface type and links) and insert my critiques below them in italics.

“Fact” 1: “Many people wrongly assume people who cannot speak are incapable of complex thought and language. 

Critique: It is well known that those who can’t speak because of motor problems can have normal-to-superior intelligence, particularly because of famous examples of this like Stephen Hawking. But non-speaking in autism is primarily a function, not of motor problems, but of diminished attention to voices and mouths, diminished joint attention behaviors, and associated intellectual impairment (See the DSM-5 and this post).

“Fact” 2: “In fact, all standard assessments of intelligence require the subject to either speak or move parts of their body in a controlled, volitional fashion. Several studies have demonstrated these assessments are inaccurate in measuring the intelligence of most non-speaking or unreliably-speaking individuals.”

Critique: All psychological tests, trivially, solicit responses. All responses, trivially, require volitional, physical responses. Only tests that peer directly into brains can bypass brain-external responses that are visible to observers. The key, in measuring intelligence autism, isn’t bypassing motor demands, but bypassing linguistic demands (except, of course, when the goal is to measure linguistic skills, which are a key component of cognition). As one of the “several studies” alluded to here shows (Courchesne et al., 2015), tests that minimize verbal demands, like the Ravens Matrices tests, are, indeed, more accessible to autistic individuals with verbal impairments, and such individuals do better on these tests. (I’ve seen this first hand with my own son). The other two of the “several studies” are irrelevant: one is a highly flawed, FC-promoting eye-tracking study, critiqued here and here, and the other is a review about what is currently known about the efficacy of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC devices). Neither reports any new evidence about the accuracy of standard assessments.

“Fact” 3: There is no anatomical basis for assuming non-speaking individuals are “non-thinking”; speech and language are processed in different parts of the brain. Assuming that an individual with impaired speech has impaired language or lacks the intelligence to produce complex communication is neither appropriate nor “evidence-based.”

Critique: Speech is a component of language. Speech and non-speech components of language are processed in overlapping parts of the brain. Speech is processed in the motor cortex in an area known as Broca’s area. Broca’s area is also involved in the production of syntactically well-formed sentences and in sentence-level comprehension. Abnormalities in Broca’s area, therefore, can affect both speech and language.

“Fact” 4: A substantial body of research also indicates that autism is fundamentally characterized by motoric and sensory differences. One recent study found that nearly two-thirds of autistic children have a motor planning disorder called apraxia (Tierney et al., 2015). Non-speaking and unreliably-speaking autistic individuals are generally unable to speak because of motor issues, not cognitive ones.

Critique: These claims are supported neither by the diagnostic criteria for autism, nor, as we have discussed here and here, by the research on motor challenges in autism. And, naming only motor and cognitive factors, they ignore the factor most relevant to non-speaking in autism: core autism symptomology and the tendency, as a function of autism symptom severity, not to tune into social stimuli like voices and faces.

“Fact” 5: Most non-speaking individuals who are learning to type have tried—usually for years—a variety of other AAC methods, including, for example, PECS, PODD, or iPad/tablet-based variations like Speak for Yourself, LAMP, and Proloquo2Go. Many users of such programs have expressed frustration at the limited vocabulary available to them, especially during the early stages of training. Moreover, these types of AAC require extensive training and customization to enable the user to communicate truly fluently—for instance to compose poetry, tell a made-up joke, take AP Chemistry, or write an op-ed about gerrymandering.

Critique: The phrase “other AAC methods” implies that FC and its variants (RPM and S2C) are forms of AAC. They aren’t. The crucial difference is that AAC is used for independent communication, free of facilitator control over messages. Most AAC devices, including those mentioned here, include alphabetic keyboards, and so do not limit users in the ways claimed above.

“Fact” 6: Virtually all other forms of AAC are taught with a heavy reliance on prompting, and the use of trained communication partners who model, correct, and otherwise support the AAC learner.

Critique: In evidence-based AAC use, this prompting, modeling, and correction of device use (how to navigate the screen; which buttons to select) occurs during the teaching phase: the phase in which a new user is being taught how to use the AAC device. Under best practices, such prompting, modeling, and correction does not occur during the communication phase: the post-teaching phase in which the user is using the device to communicate. Even during the teaching phase, moreover, the goal is to fade cues as soon as possible.

“Fact” 7: Many non-speaking people will require various kinds of support throughout their lives; some prefer that.  While many individuals with significant support needs prioritize independence, others have prioritized goals of greater interdependence rather than independence.

Critique: It’s hard to know what non-speaking people prefer when their preferences are expressed through facilitated messages—i.e., messages that are controlled by the facilitator.

“Fact” 8: The failure of many individuals to succeed on so-called “message passing tests” is interesting, but message passing tests are not the only kind of evidence available to determine whether people can communicate effectively using a keyboard or letterboard.

Critique: A message-passing test—a test in which the facilitator is blinded to what the appropriate letter selections are (i.e., because she hasn’t seen the picture the facilitated person is being asked to describe, or because she is wearing a blindfold and can’t see the letterboard)—are the only ways to ensure that facilitators aren’t (however unwittingly) cueing the typers about which letters to select.

“Fact” 9: There is incontrovertible evidence that non-speaking and unreliably-speaking individuals have learned, through painstaking practice with FC or RPM over many years, to communicate independently by typing. To see video examples of some of these individuals, click here.

Critique: As you can see if you follow the above link and watch the assorted videos, there are no examples here of truly independent typing. In all the cases, that is, there is always someone in auditory or visual cueing range of the typer. The unanswered question is what happens when that someone—who is often euphemized as a “communication partner’’—walks out of the room, such the individual they purportedly “assist” is completely free of their control.

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REFERENCES

Courchesne, V., Meilleur, A.-A.S., Poulin-Lord, M.-P., Dawson, M., & Soulières, I. (2015). Autistic children at risk of being underestimated: school-based pilot study of a strength-informed assessment. Molecular Autism, 6:12