Spelling to Communicate goes to trial

After three months of talking about telepathy, I’m changing the subject to courtroom drama. For the last few years I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit again a school district in suburban Philadelphia. The case, which dates back to 2019, came to an end in January.  While not nearly as extraordinary as telepathy, some of the drama was as odd as Oz.

As in the Land of Oz.

First, some background

Regular readers might recall this case from some earlier posts (here, here, and here). The school district in question, the Lower Merion School District of Lower Merion County, Pennsylvania, made the fateful decision not to hire a trained Spelling to Communicate (S2C) “communication partner” for a non-speaking autistic student (A.L.). The plaintiffs, A.L.’s parents, claimed that this decision violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (“Section 504”) and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The first ruling in the case occurred at the conclusion of a due process hearing back in December, 2019: the hearing officer ruled against the parents. The parents subsequently appealed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and in September, 2022, the judge, Judge Marston, denied their appeal.  Weighing heavily in both rulings was the lack of evidence for S2C and the observations of S2C reported by School District staff. As Judge Marston wrote in her ruling:

The fact that S2C is not research based and ASHA’s position statement certainly support the District’s decision not to implement S2C, but the most compelling pieces of evidence are the District’s personnel’s first-hand observations of A.L. using S2C... Ms. Grimley, the District’s speech-language pathologist, observed A.L. using S2C in December 2017. (ODR0105.) She testified that A.L.’s communication partner “us[ed] prompts” and would say things like “closer, go get it, left, up, down, while he was poking the letters.” (Id.) Ms. Van Horn, A.L.’s reading teacher, had a similar experience when she observed A.L. using S2C. (ODR0090.) She noted that he was “flubbled” and unable to provide the correct answers. (Id.) Yet, when his communication partner received the answer key, A.L. started answering the questions correctly, which troubled Ms. Van Horn and suggested to her that A.L.’s communication partner was guiding him to the correct answer. (Id.).

The parents appealed next to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and in June, 2024, the tide started turning in their favor. The Circuit Court ruled that the District Court had wrongfully denied the appeal, sending the case back to the District Court for a summary judgment or a trial by jury. Judge Marston agreed to the latter. A jury trial, of course, shifts the powers of adjudication from hearing officers and judges to... members of the general public. Raising the stakes even further, the plaintiffs decided to put A.L. on the stand, with his testimony facilitated out by an S2C communication partner.

Given how convincing S2C in action appears to be to be to most people—at least judging from the large number of positive news stories about S2C and the positive comments that predominate in public videos of even the least convincing cases of FC/RPM/S2C—things were no longer looking so good for the School District. Especially since it was unclear whether they could convince Judge Marston to allow an examination, via well-controlled message-passing tests, of who was authoring the S2C-generated messages—A.L., or his communication partner.

So the School District offered the plaintiffs a settlement—which the plaintiffs turned down. The parents were, perhaps, not only confident of winning, but eager to set a legal precedent. A decision in their favor would enable all the other families in the district who wanted the Lower Merion schools to approve and fund S2C communication partners for their minimally speaking autistic children as well—and perhaps set a precedent for similar parents all around the country.

Down the rabbit hole—or over the rainbow

On November 6th, 2024, the trial was set: January 7th, 2025. A tornado of legal activities was set in motion.

The school district had two expert witnesses for this case: Dr. Howard Shane (who testified in the original hearing) and myself (brought on after the appeal). As the more local of the experts (Howard Shane is based in Massachusetts), I was asked to attend a special hearing at the federal courthouse of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania—a ten minute train ride from home. The hearing was Daubert hearing, aka a “voir dire” (an oral questioning/examination) of several of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses whom the School District sought to disqualify. The plaintiffs had lined up some impressive experts, first and foremost Barry Prizant, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, well-known for his early work on echolalia and for his recent support for S2C. Prizant, however, wasn’t among the School District’s voir dire targets; these instead included a neuropsychologist and an S2C communication partner. The neuropsychologist was Anne Robbins, whom the parents had hired to do an independent, neurocognitive assessment of A.L. that was based, in part, on output that A.L. generated via S2C. The S2C communication partner was Tom Foti, whom the plaintiffs had designated as A.L.’s communication partner for the upcoming trial. It was the voir dire of Tom Foti that the school district wanted me to attend.

But when I showed up at the designated time and place, the earlier voir dire, that of neuropsychologist Anne Robbins, was still underway. She was being asked questions by Nicole Reimann, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers (Ms. Reimann being the only of those attorneys in attendance at this hearing). Dr. Robbins would then be handed off to the School District lawyers (of which there were three, all in attendance, but only one of whom, Mike Kristofco, would be asking questions).

What follows here and in my next few posts is based on a publicly available document: publicly available but heftily pay-walled and requiring some dozen steps for access. This document is a transcript of what happened on Monday December 2nd, 2024, in courtroom 15b in the Federal Courthouse on 6th and Market Street in downtown Philadelphia. I’ve converted it to more user friendly format (it was originally in all caps), and annotated it here and there in bracketed italics with additional impressions based both on my notes (21 pages of hasty scrawls) and on some additional post hoc reflections. I’ve also omitted those parts of the transcript that are more procedural in nature and/or otherwise less relevant to the key question for us here at FacilitatedCommunication.org: What can we learn about the validity of the instances of Spelling to Communicate that have arisen in this case?

In this first installment, I present excerpts and impressions from the first half of the voir dire of Dr. Robbins, where she is being questioned (in a “direct examination”) by Ms. Reimann, the plaintiff’s lawyer. A.L., throughout these proceedings, is referred to as “Alex.”

Reimann: Good afternoon, Dr. Robbins. How do you know Alex le Pape?

Robbins: I completed two psychological evaluations with Alex.

Reimann: And was the first one in 2018; is that right?

Robbins: 2018 was the first one; 2021 was the second.

Reimann: And when you say evaluate, what kind of evaluation did you do; can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Robbins: I was assessing certain aspects of cognitive ability and some aspects of academic abilities. And the second evaluation there was a little bit of memory testing that was done, and an adaptive behavior skills was completed.

Reimann: And do you hold any professional licenses?

Robbins: I am licensed as a psychologist in Pennsylvania.

Reimann: And do you hold a certification in Pennsylvania, as well?

Robbins: I am certified as a school psychologist in Pennsylvania.

[What follows here is further discussion of Robbins’ professional qualifications, including her doctoral degree from Widner University and her post-doctoral training at Nemours AI Dupont Children’s Hospital; her work at the now-closed Child Study Institute and Bryn Mawr college; and her work in private practice doing neuropsychological evaluations and consulting with parents and schools, in which capacity, she reports, she has evaluated “somewhere between 750 and 800 students,” of which “close to 50 percent” have a diagnosis of autism. After this, the examination turns to A.L. and a cognitive assessment Robbins did of him in 2021 using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales, 4th edition (WAIS-IV). Ms. Reimann begins by asking Dr. Robbins to read out one of the test’s guidelines.]

Reimann: If you could read the first three sentences of the block quote, and if you could just read those out loud, please.

Robbins: Quote, examinees with special needs, such as physical, language or sensory limitations, are frequently referred for psychological evaluation. With such examinees, it is important not to attribute low performance on a cognitive test to low intellectual ability when, in fact, it may be related to physical language or sensory difficulties.

Reimann: Okay. And have you seen -- you personally seen instances in your practice where scores underestimate the intellectual ability if the test is administered in a standard fashion?

Robbins: Yes.

[There is then a short discussion of modifications made during testing, including allowing the presence of a behavioral specialist and what roll they’re allowed to play. Then the questions turn to modifications made for A.L.]

Reimann: Can you tell us what modifications you made when you tested Alex?

Robbins: He used an alternative form of communication, the Spelling to Communicate method, because he is nonverbal, but he is essentially verbal with that methodology. And that methodology requires the presence of a communication partner. So there was a communication partner in the room at that time, which was his mother. So those were really the two adaptations.

Reimann: Did you give his mother instructions on what she could or could not do within -- during that -- in her role as communication partner?

Robbins: Yes.

Reimann: And what did -- what were those instructions?

Robbins: Just that she was not able to explain or, you know, encourage Alex in any way. She was repeating the letters that he was spelling. I told her she could praise him for working hard, but she was not to explain or give any real feedback to Alex while she was being a communication partner.

Reimann: And did Mrs. Binder-le Pape [Alex’s mother], did she comply with those directions?

Robbins: Yes.

Reimann: And so how -- let's just talk about how it is that you came to evaluate Alex. How were you -- how was that brought up as a possibility?

Robbins: So I was contacted by Alex's speech and language therapist who had worked with him for many, many, many years. Her name is Susan Chaplick. She was introduced to the Spelling to Communicate method that the parents and Alex showed that to her as part of her treatment. She made a decision to explore how he would perform given that mode of communication relative to how he performed in the absence of it, and the scores that were generated were significantly better. And so then I guess she had the thought that maybe we should -- maybe the parents should consider exploring what we could learn about his cognitive abilities if he was using this preferred mode of communication. And Susan Chaplick suggested they be in touch with me. And I got a call and a conversation started.

Reimann: Okay. And did you do anything to familiarize yourself with S2C and communication with the letter board and communication partner for Alex?

Robbins: Yes. Well, obviously I talked to Susan Chaplick and I got information from her based on her experience. I reviewed some videos that had been taken of him communicating using the method. And I went to observe him in one of his Spelling to Communicate training sessions at the practice in Springfield where he was undergoing training in the method.

[This clinic is called Inside Voice—it is the S2C provider closest to Philadelphia and Lower Merion County].

Reimann: Can you tell us about that observation in Springfield?

Robbins: So Tom -- Alex was working with a communication partner by the name of Tom Foti. I think that's how you pronounce it. And I was in the back of the room. And I think they were going through a pretty structured and prescribed sequence of tasks. It started with what they called a check-in where Tom asked Alex how he was doing and Alex used the spelling board to say he was happy and he was excited to do the work, et cetera. Then Tom read a passage to Alex, and then there was a prescribed set of questions that were asked of Alex following the passage. And the questions seemed to go from, you know, requiring the least amount of information or response from Alex to more information. So there was questions that had just a one-answer response. And he is spelling all of his responses. And some that requires sort of a sentence length and some interpretation of what happened in the video and what he saw, what it meant. And then at the end of that, I think Tom -- Tom asked him if he wanted to see a video of the -- the passage was about a country music singer. And he asked if he wanted to see a video of the guy. And Alex said, yes. And so they watched the video. And then after watching the video, Tom asked Alex about his impressions. And Alex communicated quite a bit of material about what he saw, what he thought, what his initial impression was, how his impression changed over the course of the video, and he spoke about his admiration for the performer. So that's what occurred in session, that's what I observed.

[Here’s where I entered the room and started taking notes.]

Reimann: And so after you did these things, spoke to Susan Chaplick, looked at the videos and then observed Alex, did you agree to do an evaluation of him with him using the letter board and communication partner?

Robbins: I did.

Reimann: And does Alex use speech to functionally communicate?

Robbins: I did not observe that.

[There follows a brief discussion of what’s meant by functional communication].

Reimann: Okay. And just generally tell the court, what did you learn from the testing you did of Alex? What you did learn about Alex?

Robbins: So his performance on the test certainly in terms of the verbal cognitive abilities were well above average compared to other students his age, obviously using the preferred and effective communication method, his sole method of communicating... His reading comprehension was also well above age and grade expectancy... There was a measure of listening comprehension where he demonstrated average or above capabilities... I attempted a few of the visual, nonverbal tests. And some he was able to complete; some I was not convinced that he understood what I was asking him to do, and I stopped him midway...

[In other words, A.L. has average or above listening comprehension capabilities but somehow didn’t understand what she was asking him to do.]

Reimann: And did you learn anything about his ability to think and communicate in abstract terms?

Robbins: Yes. Because, you know, one of the tests sort of requires some abstract and conceptual reasoning in order to see similarities amongst objects or concepts. The reading comprehension test has questions that require some informational reasoning where he had to put together information and generate what his understanding of what was being expressed in the text.

Reimann: Okay. And did you -- did Alex demonstrate a sense of humor in the time that he was with you?

Robbins: Yes, he did.

Reimann: And can you give us an example of that?

Robbins: I guess the first one that comes to mind is one of the words... on the definitions test... is “reluctant.” And his initial comment was, “Like me today.”

[More discussion of the details of the testing and how Robbins wasn’t able to calculate a full-scale IQ score because not enough subtests were completed.]

Reimann: And for the matrix reasoning, can you describe what that -- how that test is done?

Robbins: That's a visual, nonverbal test that sort of calls on pattern reasoning. So he would have visual stimuli. There would be four quadrants of information. There would be visual stimuli in three of them; there would be an empty quadrant. There would be five choices at the bottom of the manual... And the test taker is supposed to choose which of the options would complete -- would best fit with the pattern of information... They would typically point, or they do have the option to say the number. The options at the bottom have numbers.

 Reimann: Okay. And did you start -- did you initially try to do the test with Alex pointing?

Robbins: Yes, I did.

Reimann: And was he successful with that?

Robbins: No, it was very random. I could not interpret what he was pointing at. He was moving his hands.

Reimann: After that, did you also try to have him use the letter board to point to--

Robbins: Right, the letter board --

Reimann: Tell us what that looked like.

Robbins: So the letter board had number options on it, I think it was on the flip side of the board. So, you know, I proposed, why don't you make your decision and show me by... pointing at the number on your letter board and we will use that as your response.

Reimann: And was he able to do that?

Robbins: Yeah, he was able to do that.

[No question is raised about why A.L. can’t point to a numbered choice on a stationary surface, but can point to a number on a held-up letterboard.]

Reimann: And so ...  you administered that test both in 2018 and 2021; is that right?

Robbins: Yes.

Reimann: And so in 2018 when he was using the letter board, he was at the 16th percentile; is that right?

Robbins: Yes.

Reimann: And in 2021 with that same deviation from standardization, he was in the 5th percentile?

Robbins: Correct.

Reimann: Do you have any hypothesis about – I mean, is that statistically meaningful, that change, if you know, and do you have any hypothesis about why that might have occurred?

Robbins: It's difficult to know. We didn't really talk about this, but his overall presentation was different in the second set of testing. So I think he was more anxious around that testing. Obviously he still did well on the verbal. He was comfortable with the approach we were using.

[Robbins is seemingly unaware that this is a striking reversal of what’s generally found in autism: nonverbal visual pattern recognition scores are significantly higher, not significantly lower, than verbal scores (see, for example, Grondhuis et al., 2018). When it comes to matrix reasoning in particular, a study alluded to by S2C proponent Vikram Jaswal in a recent podcast on Barry Prizant’s Uniquely Human Podcast, Courchesne et al., 2015, finds relatively high performance on this kind of cognitive test as compared to others. Yet somehow, even with the letterboard, A.L. has scored much worse on matrix reasoning than on verbal ability.]

After a few more exchanges about the details of testing, the voir dire of Dr. Robbins is interrupted by the arrival of three people I recognize: A.L., his mother, and Tom Foti, the communication partner who is to assist him at the trial. Robbins steps down for now (she will later be cross-examined by the school district’s team) and Foti takes the stand. In my next post, I’ll discuss what happened next.

REFERENCES:

Grondhuis, S. N.,  Lecavalier, L. L.,  Arnold, E., Handen, B. L., Scahill, L.,  McDougle, C., L., and Aman, M. G. (2018). Differences in verbal and nonverbal IQ test scores in children with autism spectrum disorder. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 49, 47-55.

Courchesne, V., Meilleur, A. A., 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. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-015-0006-3

Just out--a review of Richard Phelps' The Malfunction of U.S. Education Policy: Elite Misinformation, Disinformation, and Selfishness

This is an important book making key points others haven't thought of--or dared to say. Our current testing regime is much worse than most people realize.

Good educational tests, like well-controlled message-passing tests, are what separate the science from the pseudoscience; the evidence-based from the quackery. 

My review is here:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2025/04/how-we-ended-up-with-substandard-tests-in-education/

When nothing else works: Blaming the scientific method instead of the pseudoscience

The world of facilitated communication and variants (RPM, S2C, Spellers Method) is heavily fortified against researchers and skeptics. Those fortifications are one reason why, despite all the evidence against it, and besides all the support it provides to desperate parents in impossible situations, FC/RPM/S2C has persisted for so many decades.

Some fortifications derive from social pressure. Using FC typically involves joining a tight-knit community of other FC users that becomes one of your main support networks. Should you ever grow disillusioned with FC, you lose all those friends, if you agree to undergo authorship testing, you incur their hostility; if you speak out publicly, you become their enemy. Most defectors keep quiet (our Janyce is an extraordinarily rare exception).

Other fortifications derive from professional pressure. If you’re a “certified” S2C practitioner and agree to authorship testing, you risk losing your “certification.”

Other fortifications derive from legal pressure. If you live or work in proximity to a facilitator and their clients—whether you are the spouse of a person who facilitates your child, or a teacher/clinician who works with a child who is facilitated by others—and if you express skepticism about, or otherwise try to resist, the use of FC, you risk serious harm to your reputation, your livelihood, and even your basic rights. To be more specific, you risk being accused, via FCed messages controlled (however unwittingly) by those who now see you as their adversary, of abusing the FCed individual. You may lose your job or custody of your child; you may get locked up for months in solitary confinement. (See Stuart Vyse’s highly disturbing piece on one such account).

Fortress of the Îlette of Kermovan, in municiplaity of Le Conquet (Finistère, Britanny, west of France). Wikimedia Commons.

But FC/RPM/S2C has also fortified itself in more theoretical ways. That is, the theories that proponents have advanced in support of FC include claims that attempt to make FC impossible to explore scientifically. One is a claim about minimally and non-speaking autism that, if true, would invalidate any observations or tests of the communicative and cognitive capabilities of minimal and non-speaking autistics—except for those observations and tests based solely on FCed output. Other claims seek to invalidate tests that are based on FCed output—specifically, message-passing tests, or tests that blind the facilitator in order to determine who is authoring the messages. Collectively, these claims, if true, would mean it’s impossible to assess the validity of FC, whether by testing via a standard language assessment if the facilitated person understands the words they spell, or by testing via a facilitator-blinded condition if the facilitated person can spell correct answers that their facilitator doesn’t know and therefore can’t cue.

In the rest of this post, I’ll take a closer look at these claims.

The claim about minimally and non-speaking autism is that the underlying disability isn’t the socio-cognitive challenges that eight decades of clinical observation, diagnostic screening tools, and empirical research have shown—and continue to show—autism to be. Rather, the underlying disability, according to FC proponents, is a mind-body disconnect. Individuals with minimal and non-speaking autism are, allegedly, unable to control their bodies, especially their fine motor movements. This effectively invalidates any attempt to assess the cognitive or linguistic skills of minimal and non-speakers with autism. That’s because all responses to test questions involve bodily responses, particularly fine motor responses: speaking, pointing to pictures, assembling shapes, and using a pencil. Indeed, all inferences based on any behaviors are purportedly invalid. Included among the invalidated inferences are these:

• That if someone is always looking away from the people speaking in their presence, they’re probably not paying attention to what’s being said;

• That if they don’t respond appropriately to requests, directions, or other communications, it’s probably because they don’t understand you;

• That if they don’t speak or type independently, it’s probably because they don’t have expressive language skills;

• That if they walk away or try to escape while being facilitated, or say “No more! No more!”, they don’t want to be facilitated.

As Elizabeth Vosseller puts it, “Insides don’t match outsides.” But where does that leave us?

Even eye movements, powerful indicators of what someone is attending to or thinking about, purportedly reveal nothing in minimally and non-speaking autism. Some FCed individuals are said to have “ocular apraxia,” such that they can’t control their eye movements. Some are said to use peripheral vision instead of direct gaze, such that where they’re looking isn’t necessarily what they’re looking at, and such that they can supposedly see the letters they’re pointing to during FC sessions even when they appear to be looking away. Some routinely wear sunglasses, allegedly because of visual sensitivities, making it hard to see what they’re looking at.

But, in fact, the only basis we have for making any judgments about anyone (unless, of course, we’re telepathic and can read their minds directly) are their body movements: their speech, gestures, facial expressions, and actions. The mind-body disconnect theory of autism, therefore, makes autistic individuals essentially impossible to evaluate—and makes all claims about autistic individuals both unverifiable and unfalsifiable.

This, in turn, makes the mind-body disconnect theory not only profoundly wrong (i.e., in conflict with eight decades of clinical observation, diagnostic screening tools, and empirical research, and without any empirical support of its own), but profoundly unscientific. That’s because falsifiability—being susceptible to being disproven—isn’t just the foundation of science, but the largely agreed-upon demarcation between science and pseudoscience that dates back to philosopher of science Karl Popper.

Which brings us to a quick detour into Karl Popper’s insights.

Popper, recognizing that some claims are hard to prove, also recognized that some such claims are nonetheless more scientific than others. In particular, he recognized a distinction between claims like All swans are white and claims like We’re living in a computer simulation (my example; not his). While it’s impossible to prove that all swans are white (because that would involve somehow inspecting every single swan, past, present, and future), All swans are white, at least, has the virtue of being falsifiable. That is, it can be falsified if a single non-white swan is found. And thus, All swans are white counts as a scientific claim (one that may turn out to be false).

We’re living in a computer simulation, however, cannot be falsified. That’s because anything that looks like evidence that we’re not living in a computer simulation could be part of the simulation. Any experiment we try to do to test whether we’re in a computer simulation, including the results of that experiment, could be part of the simulation. Thus, this claim is not a scientific one—it will never turn out to be false, even if it is false.

Curiously, there’s at least one outlier in the philosophy universe who’s proposed a totally different way to demarcate science from pseudoscience. This wasn’t someone I’d ever heard of (he appears to be unaffiliated), but he was recently cited on X, seemingly in support of the paranormal claims made on the Telepathy Tapes podcast about non-speaking individuals with autism who are subjected to S2C.

This self-styled philosopher—I’m not sure what else to call him—states that it isn’t the various empirical claims out there that we should be judging as pseudoscientific, but, rather, the methods we use to judge those claims (Westcombe, 2019). For him, a method is scientific “if it is well suited to establishing the truth or falsehood of a particular empirical claim” and pseudoscientific “if it is not well suited to establishing the truth or falsehood of a particular empirical claim.” Since no method is well suited to establishing the truth or falsehood of an empirical claim that turns out to be unfalsifiable, any method that takes on such a claim is, according to Westcombe’s approach, a pseudoscientific method.

By shifting the stigma of “pseudoscience” from claim to method, this approach effectively shields all claims from all charges of being pseudoscientific. Instead, the only entities that are potentially pseudoscientific are the methods that investigate these claims. Any method that investigates a claim that turns out to be unfalsifiable takes the blame for that unfalsifiability: the method is now pseudoscientific, while the claim itself stays above reproach. Since Westcombe fails to show why this seemingly upside-down philosophy is superior to Popper’s—he doesn’t even mention Popper—it isn’t worth spending more time on it. Except that, as we’ll see below, Westcombe isn’t the only one to suggest that methods, rather than claims, are the ones at fault when methods investigate problematic claims.

Which takes us to the other set of claims that attempt to fortify FC against scientific exploration. These are claims that attempt to discredit message-passing tests—tests that rigorously assess who is authoring the facilitated messages by blinding the facilitator to the answers to questions directed at the person they’re facilitating. Such tests, mostly dating to the 1990s, have consistently shown that it is the facilitator, not the facilitated person, who controls the typing.

Some arguments against authorship tests invoke the Observer Effect: the disturbance of what’s being observed by the act of observation. For example, according to Sheehan and Matuozzi’s pro-FC paper (Sheehan & Matuozzi, 1992), Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Schawlow, himself the father of an FC user,

described certain experimental efforts to investigate facilitated communication validity[i.e., message-passing tests] as analogous to looking for a ping pong ball on the floor of a dark room by shuffling your feet around. If you touch it even slightly it is not there anymore.

It’s not clear how message-passing tests could cause the equivalent of a dislocation of a ping pong ball, but this objection would apparently rule out such tests as hopelessly unreliable.

Some arguments against authorship tests focus on psychological effects that purportedly invalidate their results. Rigorous testing, allegedly, is inherently hostile; facilitated individuals, allegedly, sense the researchers’ skepticism about their linguistic capabilities. Their performance is further undermined, allegedly, by “stereotype threat”: negative stereotypes that can undermine test performance in marginalized groups, in this case negative stereotypes about the capabilities of minimal and non-speakers with autism. All this conspires, allegedly, to create memory retrieval difficulties so prohibitive that the facilitated person is unable to come up with the words for the pictures they’re shown during testing—even words as simple as “hat” and “flower.”

One problem with these arguments—besides the lack of evidence for them—is that they don’t explain how it is that, as in some of the 1990s message-passing tests, the facilitated person is able to type the words that label what their facilitator saw. Why would a facilitated person, allegedly underperforming due to a hostile environment, be able label these words, but not the words that label what they saw and their facilitator didn’t see?

I’m aware of only two proponents of FC/RPM/S2C who attempt to address this question: Rosemary Crossley, credited with introducing FC to the English-speaking world in the late 1970s, and Cathie Davies, a once-frequent commenter on this blog whose comments here ceased three years ago, right around the time that Crossley passed away. In those comments (here, here, and here), Davies acknowledges that in the rigorous message-passing tests of previous decades, facilitated individuals often typed what the facilitator saw, not what they saw and their facilitator didn’t.

The results of message passing studies should, by now, be very predictable. There is little point in replicating such studies, as I am not aware that the results are widely contested.

But for her, the question is “how are those results to be interpreted?” Critics, she claims, have produced only one alternative interpretation to facilitator control:  “the straw man – ESP.” Davies, if she’s still around, is apparently not an enthusiast of the Telepathy Tapes.

For Davies, neither facilitator control nor telepathy explains why the facilitated person types “flower” when only the facilitator saw the picture of the flower. Furthermore, like Westcombe, she faults the method (asking the autistic person to label an external stimulus like a picture) rather than the claim it’s investigating (the validity of FC). For Davies, the method is at fault for being unreliable, and the researchers are at fault for drawing faulty conclusions.

Your preferred experimental design may be adequate to demonstrate that many FC users do not pass messages under controlled conditions. However, such studies have no power to explain why this may be so. We do not currently know enough about the relevant population to design experiments able to distinguish between competing explanatory hypotheses.

Thus, she concludes, all conclusions based on this method (prompting the autistic person to label a picture that the facilitator didn’t see) are “speculative.”

One reason they’re speculative, Davies says, is:

[T]he principle of the underdetermination of theory by evidence (Quine, 1951). Experimental data is typically consistent with a broad array of competing theoretical explanations.

But how is data generated by tests that prompt the autistic person to label a picture that the facilitator didn’t see ambiguous in any significant way? The ambiguity, Davies claims, comes from the fact that the tests are “closed-item” tests—that is, they solicit a particular word or phrase rather than an open-ended response. This, she claims, is not representative of the type of communication that FC is all about—namely, open-ended communication:

[S]ubjects’ performance in message passing or responding to closed questions says little about their capacity for self-motivated communication on topics important to themselves: the type of communication most commonly reported in non-experimental studies and, arguably, the type of communication most valuable to the communicators.

She adds:

[T]he task demands for self-motivated communication are different from those for message passing under controlled conditions, particularly in relation to processing exteroceptive (“outside-in”) sensory information [presumably by this Davies means tasks like labeling a picture].

For this reason, Davies claims, closed-item tests are actually less rigorous than tests that elicit self-motivated communication.

She adds that closed-item testing is more susceptible to facilitator influence than open-ended communication:

Research has demonstrated that facilitator influence is more likely in the context of closed questions with simple answers (Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003).

The facilitated individuals in Wegner et al.’s studies were verbally fluent adults (at least inasmuch as they were Harvard undergraduates); this limits the applicability of Wegner et al.’s findings to minimally and non-speaking FCed autistics. Nevertheless, Davies claims that these findings further undermine the assumption “that tests involving closed questions with simple answers are the most rigorous tests.”

But the more open-ended the question, the harder it is to blind the facilitator to its answer, and the harder it is to verify that the answer produced by the facilitated person is the correct answer. Thus, closed questions are necessary conditions for rigorous tests.

As for Davies’ claim that “responding to closed questions says little about [the] capacity for self-motivated communication,” the linguistic skills involved in picture-labeling (basic expressive vocabulary skills) are a prerequisite for open-ended communication. If a person isn’t able to produce the word “flower” when asked to label a picture of a flower, how are they able to produce more sophisticated words and string them together into the sentences that regularly appear as FCed output? And how is the cognitive process of producing the word “flower” in response to a question about a picture more challenging than producing the word “flower” in an open-ended, “self-motivated” description of a walk you took through the park? Davies might claim that flowers and walks in the park might not qualify as “topics important to themselves.” Message-passing tests, however, can be, and have been, adjusted to include objects related to such topics, and the results remain the same.

But Davies also claims that in “closed-item testing” the facilitated person may be less sure of him or herself and so may seek cues from the facilitator:

[W]hen unsure what is required of them or anxious about presenting a wrong answer - FC users may actively and intentionally seek cues from their facilitators.

She adds:

It would, however, be difficult to characterise this behaviour as “control” by facilitators!

For Davies, in other words, if a facilitated person types “flower” when only the facilitator saw a picture of a flower, this may be evidence, not of control by the facilitator, but of “cue seeking” by the facilitated person.

As an example of cue seeking, Davies cites a subject with “complex communication needs” in a study by Kezuka (1997):

It appeared that J had learned to scan the keys with her pointing finger until slight changes in force from the assistant signalled her to drop her finger to the letter below” (p.576).

What Kezuka means by “learned” here is unclear: some learning is non-conscious and includes conditioned responses to facilitator cues which, in turn, is the basis for facilitator control. But arguably, even conscious learning about facilitator cues, and adherence to those cues, count as facilitator control. If a teacher shushes a student, and the student, as a conscious response to being shushed, stops talking, the teacher is arguably the one in control. There is, in other words, little reason to believe that the scenario presented by Kezuka doesn’t involve facilitator control.

Besides claiming that they “cannot distinguish between ‘control’ by facilitators or ‘cue seeking’ by communicators” and that they do not measure the “self-motivated communication skills” that are “representative of FC practice,” Davies cites one more problem with message-passing tests: their consistently negative results:

Regardless of the reason, testing FC users’ ability to communicate using a task that is so clearly problematic for many must be questioned.

In other words, what most people would consider to be evidence of facilitator control—the consistently negative results of message-passing tests—Davies considers, instead, to be evidence against the validity of the tests.

This line of reasoning, of course, would call into question the validity of any method that consistently returns negative results—for example, a method that consistently returns negative results for claims that the earth is flat.

Davies adds a quote from Shadish et al (2002):

[I]f a study produces negative results, it is often the case that program developers and other advocates then bring up methodological and substantive contingencies that might have changed the result. For instance, they might contend that a different outcome measure or population would have led to a different conclusion. Subsequent studies then probe these alternatives and, if they again prove negative, lead to yet another round of probes of whatever new explanatory possibilities have emerged.

Shadish et al, as quoted by Davies, allows that eventually there may be a consensus that the negative results are real, but “that this process is as much or more social than logical.” In other words, non-objective and non-rigorous.

Returning to the question of authorship, Davies states: “I would like to say ‘get a new test.’”  And what would be a better test than asking the facilitated person to label a picture that the facilitator didn’t see?

Instead of concentrating on the comparatively unremarkable cue-seeking behaviour, surely it would be better to engage with the population in coproduced, participatory research to explore what else may be going on?

Elaborating, Davies claims that:

[M]odels of evidence-based practice...demand consideration, not only of academic research, but also of stakeholder perspectives and clinical experience. The weighting given to evidence from these sources is decided through open and transparent deliberation. No one of these three types of evidence is automatically given precedence over the others.

In other words, non-objective and non-rigorous. Any research on FC that includes “evidence” from stakeholder perspectives and clinical experience will naturally include facilitators (whose vested interests and resultant biases are arguably stronger than anyone else’s) and FCed messages attributed FCed individuals (where any a priori assumptions about authenticity will lead to circular reasoning and warped outcomes).

In the end, though, Davies seems to rule out any kind of authorship testing—no matter how rigorous or “rigorous.” She claims not only that “no valid outcome measure [i.e., authorship test] is currently available,” but that, even if there were a “valid” authorship test, deploying it may no longer be feasible. That’s because:

[A] group of individuals as hostile and entrenched in their dogma as critics of FC have proven to be... people such as yourself and your colleagues... may have effectively poisoned the waters so that no such research can be conducted.

In short, Davies tries to argue

• that the most rigorous tests are the least rigorous

• that the consistently negative results they’ve produced show that there must be something wrong with the tests, not what they’re testing, and

• that the skepticism that people such as myself and my colleagues have acquired as a result of those consistently negative results has made any future authorship testing of any sort impossible.

In the end, this shifting of blame from the problematic claims that experimental methods have consistently invalidated over to the experimental methods that have invalidated the problematic claims recalls Westcombe’s upside-down reasoning about pseudoscience.

Cathie Davies, assuming she’s still alive and that this is her actual name, appears, like Westcombe, to be unaffiliated. But some like-minded individuals are considerably more powerful—particularly if they happen to be editors at major journals, or people assigned by those editors to review papers. A paper I contributed to, which included a description of various ways to conduct message-passing tests, was assigned a reviewer who claimed that the message-passing tests “have not undergone any empirical scrutiny” and that we should “state more clearly that it is currently unknown how often these authorship check strategies will conclude that messages are not genuine when in fact they are.”

This reviewer, as we wrote to the journal editor, seemed to want us to expand our paper to include an empirical defense of basic principles of experimental design. This left us wondering what it would be like if such a demand were made of studies in general; not just studies of FC. Studies examining the validity of telepathy might use designs similar to those we describe for FC: blinding the targeted recipient of the telepathic message to the message contents and to any possible cueing from the “sender”. Are the results of such studies unreliable until their empirical designs have somehow been empirically validated and their probabilities of drawing erroneous conclusions somehow calculated? What would such a meta-validation even look like, and how would we avoid infinite regress?

But of course, all this is beside the point. The point, at least for some people, is not to explore claims and test outcomes, but to erect fortifications—especially, apparently, when they pertain to FC.

---

REFERENCES

Kezuka E. (1997). The role of touch in facilitated communication. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 27(5), 571–593. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1025882127478

Popper, Karl (1962). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (2002 ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-28594-0. excerpt: Science as Falsification

Quine, W.O. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20-43. 

Sheehan, C. M., & Matuozzi, R. T. (1996). Investigation of the validity of facilitated communication through disclosure of unknown information. Mental Retardation, 34, 94-107.

Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. (2 ed.) Cengage Learning.

Wegner, D. M., Fuller, V. A., & Sparrow, B. (2003). Clever hands: Uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(1), 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.1.5

Westcombe, A., (2019). I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means: A Response to Reber and Alcock’s “Searching for the Impossible: Parapsychology’s Elusive Quest.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 617–622, 2019

How FC myths coincide with edu-myths—and why even those who don’t believe in telepathy are primed to believe in FC

In my last post, I proposed one reason for the popularity of the Telepathy Tapes: how predisposed people are to believe in paranormal phenomena. Here I examine another reason: how predisposed people are to believe that autistic non-speakers can be unlocked via held-up letterboards—that is, via variants of facilitated communication known alternatively as Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C).

First, the Telepathy Folks

As far as Telepathy Tapes listeners go, part of this inclination comes from the fact that the podcast provides no explicit indications that the individuals on the Telepathy Tapes are being cued by their facilitators. The podcast is audio only, and so in scenes where nonspeaking autistic individuals type out messages on letterboards, all we have are the verbal descriptions provided Ky Dickens, who is not only the show’s host, but a fervent believer in FC. And Dickens’ verbal descriptions omit that the letterboards are held up and inevitably shift around while the autistic person’s extended index finger roams around in front of the letter arrays. The show does provide a few videos behind a paywall, but the facilitator cueing in these, as with many other videos RPM and S2C, is proving to be too subtle for most naïve viewers.

But that doesn’t fully explain what so many people with no vested interest in FC are apparently ready to believe—judging, at least from what we’ve heard from the many Telepathy Tapes enthusiasts. Presented with verbal descriptions of scenarios in which an autistic person points to a number that only the facilitator saw, or to a sequence of letters that labels a picture that only the facilitator saw, a surprisingly large number of Telepathy Tapes listeners have concluded that this is both:

A.      a reliable description of what happened, and

B.      evidence, not that the facilitator might be influencing the number/letter selection through via normal, if subtle, physical mechanisms, but that the facilitator is instead sending a telepathic message that is picked up and acted upon by the autistic non-speaker.

Beyond telepathy believers

As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog, you don’t have to believe in telepathy to ignore or dismiss facilitator cueing. But dismissing facilitator cueing entails at least one extraordinary belief: namely, that non-speaking autistic individuals, who typically show little signs of attending to other people, or of comprehending more than a few basic words and phrases, and who typically aren’t included in general education classrooms, have somehow acquired sophisticated vocabularies and literacy skills, worldly knowledge, and academic skills across the entire K12 curriculum. For telepathy believers, the explanation is straightforward: this acquisition happens through telepathy. For everyone else, there are instead a host of FC-friendly education myths that have long dominated the world of K12 education and in turn, through the salience of K12 education in many people’s lives, also dominate our popular beliefs.

Myth #1: Kids can learn academic skills by osmosis.

Within and beyond the education world, there’s a widespread belief that, just as many non-academic skills can be learned through immersion and incidental learning in the natural environment, the same holds for academic skills. That is, just as typically developing children learn to walk, talk, and build block towers without any explicit instruction, the same, purportedly, goes for reading, writing, and arithmetic. Indeed, there’s an entire pedagogy based on this notion: “child-centered discovery learning.”

For reading, this means immersing children in a “print-rich environment.” For math and science, it means manipulatives (blocks, rods, chips) and child-centered exploration. Teachers are “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage,” providing minimal instruction or error correction. (See for example Hirsch, 1996; Ravitch, 2000). While few schools take such notions to extremes, and while learning to read through osmosis has been widely discredited, the general notion that discovery learning is more effective than direct instruction continues to resonate broadly and deeply throughout K12 education and on into the general public.

And it extends, naturally, to the world of FC. Indeed, Douglas Biklen, the person credited with bringing FC to the U.S. from Australia  more or less echoed the proponents of literacy through print-rich environments when he said, by way of explanation for the literacy skills in FC, that:

I think it's rather obvious that the way in which these children learned to read was the way that most of us learned to read-- that is, by being immersed in a language-rich environment. You go into good pre-school classrooms and you'll see words everywhere, labeling objects, labeling pictures. You look at Sesame Street. We're introducing words. We're giving people whole words. We're also introducing them to the alphabet. (Palfreman, 1993).

As in K12 education, this line of thinking extends beyond literacy to other skills and knowledge. FC proponents have claimed that FCed children have learned about current events by listening to NPR (Iversen, 2006); Spanish by listening to their siblings practice at home (Handley, 2021); and physics by overhearing a physics class through a cafeteria wall (personal communication).

In K12, the illusion that students can master material without explicit instruction is sustained by powerful prompts and cues from teachers, often in the form of leading questions. I discussed this phenomenon in an earlier post; we can see it play out in detail, for example, in Emily Hanford’s Sold A Story. This podcast is an exposé of an approach to reading known as “Balanced Literacy” and/or “Three Cueing” that eschews phonics instruction and encourages kids to guess words from context. In Episode 1, a teacher reads a story about two children, Zelda and Ivy, who have run away from home because they didn’t want to eat the cucumber sandwiches their father had made for them. The teacher turns to a page where a word is covered up by a sticky note and prompts the students to use context to guess what it is. The word occurs at a point where the Zelda and Ivy are wondering how their parents will react when they realize they’re gone. Here is the excerpt:

Teacher: Do you think that covered word could be the word “miss”?...

Teacher: Could it be the word miss? Because now that they’re gone maybe their parents will miss them?

The teacher asks the kids to think about whether “miss” could be the word using the strategies they’ve been taught.

Teacher: Let’s do our triple check and see. Does it make sense? Does it sound right? How about the last part of our triple check? Does it look right? Let’s uncover the word and see if it looks right?

The teacher lifts up the sticky note and indeed, the word is “miss.”

Teacher: It looks right too. Good job. Very good job.

(Sold a Story, Episode 1 transcript).

The teacher doesn’t seem to recognize what a big clue this is—that is, how many other possibilities there might be: “find,” “scold,” “resent,” etc.—and therefore to what degree she’s essentially told the students the answer and, quite likely, overestimated their word-identification skills.

Precisely this sort of oral prompting pervades—and sustains the illusion of— the more recent variants of FC—Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling to Communicate (S2C), and Spellers Method, where facilitators frequently direct letter selection with phrases like “up-up-up,” “right next door,” and “get it!”

Myth #2: All students are equally capable: they just need the right environment for learning and the right outlet for demonstrating understanding.

The world of K12 education has become increasingly resistant to the reality that different children have different levels of academic readiness and academic achievement. Instead, large proportions of education professionals, along with large proportions of the general public, embrace pseudoscientific theories (“multiple intelligences”; “learning styles”) that recast differences in skills as differences in styles. These beliefs have continued to spread despite the growing evidence against them (Willingham et al., 2015; Newton & Salvi, 2020). Individuals once viewed as low achievers are now often labeled as “bodily-kinesthetic learners.” This type of learner, purportedly, doesn’t do well in traditional classrooms but will prove quite competent with instruction and activities that incorporate lots of movement (skits, dances, building things, marching around the classroom). Individuals who struggle to read or do math might also be labeled as “visual learners”—purportedly performing perfectly well so long as teachers replace letters and numbers with pictures.

Consistent with these assumptions, assessments are now less about testing specific skills and more about giving students multiple options for “demonstrating understanding.” Specific suggestions include allowing kids to make presentations, posters, or “concept maps” instead of pen-and-paper tests, and providing supports like text-to-speech and speech-to-text (see for example, here). A “visual” student might, for example, retell a story in pictures rather than in words.

The presumption that all students are equally capable, given the appropriate adjustments, echoes a mantra of FC proponents that dates back to Douglas Biklen: Always presume competence. But the similarities don’t end there. In FC, as in education, the apparent (but purportedly not actual) challenges of the population in question are explained by invoking the person’s body. The education world, regarding students who struggle in traditional classrooms, invokes a bodily-kinesthetic learning style; the FC world, regarding minimal speakers with autism, invokes a mind-body disconnect. Finally, just like it’s the teacher’s job to figure out the best way for individual students to demonstrate the understanding that they’re presumed to have somehow acquired, it’s the facilitator’s job, via the letterboard or keyboard, to figure out the motor or regulatory support needed for individual clients to demonstrate the literacy skills and academic knowledge that they, too, are presumed to have somehow acquired.

One final commonality here between the FC world and the edu-world is the notion that the hard work that people used to think was necessary—whether the direct, systematic instruction and “drill and kill” of traditional classrooms or the intensive, one-on-one “discrete trials” of ABA—can be bypassed by methods that simply (1) presume that children are capable of learning on their own and (2) provide appropriate supports and outlets for children to put that learning to use.

Myth #3: Traditional, controlled tests are unreliable and don’t measure what really matters.

In the education world, there has long been a resistance to high-stakes standardized tests that measure student achievement. Particularly vociferous are those most invested in the teaching business: teachers unions and education schools (Phelps, 2023). These individuals make several arguments against using such tests—arguments that resonate across the general public. Among other things, they claim that:

• Testing is stressful, and some students perform poorly only because of anxiety. (There is some evidence for lowered performance in those with test anxiety, and some evidence for effective remedies).

• Marginalized groups may underperform on standardized test because the tests are biased against them or because of “stereotype threat.” (There is some empirical support for the latter, and some effective remedies).

• Standardized tests can only measure rote skills and “teaching to the test,” not conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking (see also here). (Untrue: here standardized tests effectively measure conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking. This is why, for example, the SAT has been a better predictor of college success than grades are).

• There are better ways to measure student achievement—e.g., projects, presentations, portfolios of student work. (These measures are much more subjective and unreliable).

While standardized statewide tests are still routinely administered across the country, the interest groups most resistant to high-stakes testing have effectively eliminated the most informative of such tests: those tests that most fully, comprehensively, and objectively assess students’ skills across a variety of key academic sub-skills and provide the most information about which educational pedagogies are working and which students have been most ill-served by which pedagogies. The canonical example of such tests is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). The ITBS was once used by schools across the country (I took it multiple times as a kid in Illinois); it has become decreasingly popular since then and was recently replaced by new “Common Core-aligned” tests. Used until recently by many in the homeschooling community, the ITBS reported sub-scores in various aspects of reading and math and placed no ceiling on skills being measured, such that a 4th grader could score at a 6th-grade level in a particular reading sub-skill.

Most of the new Common Core-inspired state tests, in contrast, only report general scores for reading and math, not sub-scores. They also only measure students up to what the state considers to be grade-level standards: standards which many testing experts consider, for most grades, to be set too low. Also reducing the tests’ informational value is the fact that some of the math questions require literacy skills (explaining your answer) and that students can receive partial credit for incorrect answers for which they provided verbal explanations. (Both of these factors artificially lower the scores, relative to other students, of English learners and students with language delays—including students with autism). The tests are further compromised by low security: teachers rather than outside proctors administer the tests, and some large-scale cheating episodes have come to light (see Phelps, 2023).

Also decreasingly informative are the SATs, which many colleges have made optional, and which have been redesigned to measure fewer skills with less precision. Many of the math problems allow calculators, and few require complex algebraic operations. The analogies and vocabulary sections are gone, as are questions that ask students to synthesize long passages. Passages now consist of 1-2 short paragraphs, often accompanied by charts and graphs, followed by a single question that often is more about the chart than the paragraph(s). The passages (and graphics) are no longer drawn from the works of professional writers but instead are written by test-makers; as a result they’re often hard to make sense of, not because the writing is sophisticated, but because they’re poorly written (or designed). Test-takers no longer lose points for guessing, so guessing rates have gone up, adding even more noise to the signal.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular early reading assessments in use in K12 schools, Fountas and Pinnnell Benchmark Assessment, is so poor at detecting skilled vs. struggling readers as to be equivalent to a coin toss.

As for those who want to promote a particular pedagogical approach as “evidence-based,” in lieu of standardized testing that might indicate objective effects on learning outcomes, we have anecdotal reports from classrooms: subjective accounts of high levels of student and teacher engagement, interviews with teachers, annotations of student work, and/or researchers’ field notes. “Lived experience” substitutes for objective testing; anecdotes for evidence.

And if the education world needs one more reason to dismiss objective tests, Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens obliges. On her “resources” page she claims, falsely, that ”nothing in education can truly be empirically validated because every student is inherently unique.”

Which takes us back to FC. FC proponents, just like their counterparts in the education world, have successfully suppressed informative testing. While the Don’t test mantra dates back to Douglas Biklen and the 1990s, there were, in that decade, a number of FC practitioners who nonetheless willingly participated in objective tests. But those tests consistently established that the facilitators were the ones controlling the FCed messages. What came next was a host of arguments against authorship tests that parallel the education world’s arguments against academic tests:

• Test anxiety purportedly impedes the FCed person’s ability to type messages, particularly in the hostile environment that purportedly results from skeptical examiners.

• Test performance is further undermined by stereotype threat: that is, by negative stereotypes about the abilities of minimally speaking individuals with autism (Jaswal et al., 2020) (Unlike in educational testing, there is no evidence that either anxiety or stereotype threat affects authorship testing).

• Authorship tests are insulting and violate the dictum to Always presume competence. (Apparently standardized education tests aren’t as insulting or unethical. Many FCed individuals take such tests—with the help of their facilitators).

• There are alternative ways to assess authorship that are purportedly more reliable, like comparing the writing styles of the FCed individual and their facilitator(s), or looking at whether their pointing rhythms suggest an awareness of English spelling patterns, or mounting an eye-tracking computer on their heads and recording whether they look to letters before they point to them (Jaswal et al., 2020; Jaswal et al., 2024; Nicoli et al., 2023). (See here, here, and here for critiques).

• Or better yet: there’s lived experience. FC-generated accounts attributed to FCed individuals recount their experiences with FC and explain how it’s really them producing the FCed messages. Videos or live observations of FCed individuals typing purportedly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they aren’t being cued by the assistant who is always within auditory or visual cueing range.

• As for other types of standardized tests—cognitive tests, academic tests— none of these should be conducted on any minimally speaking autistic individual except through FC. That’s because all such tests require some sort of physical response (pointing to pictures; arranging shapes; filling in bubbles), and so the purported mind-body disconnect makes these tests hopelessly unreliable.

The hostility in both the worlds of FC and the worlds of education towards objective, well-controlled, informative testing underscores what’s so powerful about such tests: they are the brass tacks that everything comes down to. They are, in all areas of life, what separates the science from the pseudoscience and exposes the clinical quacks and methodological cracks for who and what they are—whether in K12 education, in minimally-speaking autism, or on podcasts about telepathy.

While standardized statewide tests are still routinely administered across the country, the interest groups most resistant to high-stakes testing have effectively eliminated the most informative of such tests: those tests that most fully, comprehensively, and objectively assess students’ skills across a variety of key academic sub-skills and provide the most information about which educational pedagogies are working and which students have been most ill-served by which pedagogies. The canonical example of such tests is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). The ITBS was once used by schools across the country (I took it multiple times as a kid in Illinois); it has become decreasingly popular since then and was recently replaced by new “Common Core-aligned” tests. Used until recently by many in the homeschooling community, the ITBS reported sub-scores in various aspects of reading and math and placed no ceiling on skills being measured, such that a 4th grader could score at a 6th-grade level in a particular reading sub-skill.

Most of the new Common Core-inspired state tests, in contrast, only report general scores for reading and math, not sub-scores. They also only measure students up to what the state considers to be grade-level standards: standards which many testing experts consider, for most grades, to be set too low. Also reducing the tests’ informational value is the fact that some of the math questions require literacy skills (explaining your answer) and that students can receive partial credit for incorrect answers for which they provided verbal explanations. (Both of these factors artificially lower the scores, relative to other students, of English learners and students with language delays—including students with autism). The tests are further compromised by low security: teachers rather than outside proctors administer the tests, and some large-scale cheating episodes have come to light (see Phelps, 2023).

Also decreasingly informative are the SATs, which many colleges have made optional, and which have been redesigned to measure fewer skills with less precision. Many of the math problems allow calculators, and few require complex algebraic operations. The analogies and vocabulary sections are gone, as are questions that ask students to synthesize long passages. Passages now consist of 1-2 short paragraphs, often accompanied by charts and graphs, followed by a single question that often is more about the chart than the paragraph(s). The passages (and graphics) are no longer drawn from the works of professional writers but instead are written by test-makers; as a result they’re often hard to make sense of, not because the writing is sophisticated, but because they’re poorly written (or designed). Test-takers no longer lose points for guessing, so guessing rates have gone up, adding even more noise to the signal.

As for those who want to promote a particular pedagogical approach as “evidence-based,” in lieu of standardized testing that might indicate objective effects on learning outcomes, we have anecdotal reports from classrooms: subjective accounts of high levels of student and teacher engagement, interviews with teachers, annotations of student work, and/or researchers’ field notes. “Lived experience” substitutes for objective testing; anecdotes for evidence.

And if the education world needs one more reason to dismiss objective tests, Telepathy Tapes host Ky Dickens obliges. On her “resources” page she claims, falsely, that ”nothing in education can truly be empirically validated because every student is inherently unique.”

Which takes us back to FC. FC proponents, just like their counterparts in the education world, have successfully suppressed informative testing. While the Don’t test mantra dates back to Douglas Biklen and the 1990s, there were, in that decade, a number of FC practitioners who nonetheless willingly participated in objective tests. But those tests consistently established that the facilitators were the ones controlling the FCed messages. What came next was a host of arguments against authorship tests that parallel the education world’s arguments against academic tests:

• Test anxiety purportedly impedes the FCed person’s ability to type messages, particularly in the hostile environment that purportedly results from skeptical examiners.

• Test performance is further undermined by stereotype threat: that is, by negative stereotypes about the abilities of minimally speaking individuals with autism (Jaswal et al., 2020) (Unlike in educational testing, there is no evidence that either anxiety or stereotype threat affects authorship testing).

• Authorship tests are insulting and violate the dictum to Always presume competence. (Apparently standardized education tests aren’t as insulting or unethical. Many FCed individuals take such tests—with the help of their facilitators).

• There are alternative ways to assess authorship that are purportedly more reliable, like comparing the writing styles of the FCed individual and their facilitator(s), or looking at whether their pointing rhythms suggest an awareness of English spelling patterns, or mounting an eye-tracking computer on their heads and recording whether they look to letters before they point to them (Jaswal et al., 2020; Jaswal et al., 2024; Nicoli et al., 2023). (See here, here, and here for critiques).

• Or better yet: there’s lived experience. FC-generated accounts attributed to FCed individuals recount their experiences with FC and explain how it’s really them producing the FCed messages. Videos or live observations of FCed individuals typing purportedly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they aren’t being cued by the assistant who is always within auditory or visual cueing range.

• As for other types of standardized tests—cognitive tests, academic tests— none of these should be conducted on any minimally speaking autistic individual except through FC. That’s because all such tests require some sort of physical response (pointing to pictures; arranging shapes; filling in bubbles), and so the purported mind-body disconnect makes these tests hopelessly unreliable.

The hostility in both the worlds of FC and the worlds of education towards objective, well-controlled, informative testing underscores what’s so powerful about such tests: they are the brass tacks that everything comes down to. They are, in all areas of life, what separates the science from the pseudoscience and exposes the clinical quacks and methodological cracks for who and what they are—whether in K12 education, in minimally-speaking autism, or on podcasts about telepathy.

REFERENCES

Handley, J. B., & Handley, J. (2021). Underestimated: An autism miracle. Skyhorse.

Hanford, E. (2022). Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. [Podcast]. APM reports.

Hirsch, E.D. (1996). The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. New York: Doubleday.

Iversen, P. (2006). Strange son. Riverhead.

Jaswal, V. K., Wayne, A., & Golino, H. (2020). Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 7882. doi:10.103841598-020-64553-9 PMID:32398782

Jaswal, V. K., Lampi, A. J., & Stockwell, K. M. (2024). Literacy in nonspeaking autistic people. Autism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241230709

Newton, P., & Salvi, A. (2020). How Common Is Belief in the Learning Styles Neuromyth, and Does It Matter? A Pragmatic Systematic Review, Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.602451

Palfreman, J. (Director). (1993). Prisoners of Silence [Documentary]. PBS.

Phelps, R. (2023). The Malfunction of US Education Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowen and Littlefield.

Ravitch, D. (2000). Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The Scientific Status of Learning Styles Theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628315589505

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https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing