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

Back to School Edition: At What Point Do Accommodations Start Resembling Facilitated Communication?

Within local autism politics, I’ve become aware of an alliance between parents whose children are subjected to variants of facilitated communication (Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method) and parents of higher-functioning autistic children, who aren’t. At first this alliance surprised me. Wouldn’t parents of verbal autistic children recognize how odd it is that facilitated children are able to output messages of much greater linguistic sophistication and social insight than those produced by their own children? That facilitated messages contain so many more metaphors and sophisticated social and psychological vocabulary words than unfacilitated messages produced by higher-functioning individuals who communicate independently? 

Compare: 

• “The irony of a nonspeaking autistic encouraging you to use your voice is not lost on me.” (Facilitated)

• “This fan is made by Halsey, and doesn't have a brand name anywhere on top of the motor housing or on the switch housing.” (Unfacilitated)

• “My senses always fall in love: they spin, swoon;  they lose themselves in one another’s arms.  Your senses live alone like bachelors, like bitter, slanted rhymes whose marriage is a sham.” (Facilitated)

• “Doing something fairly bad is only 3 and bad is 2 and very bad is 1.” (Unfacilitated).

Furthermore, why would parents of higher-functioning children who speak and type independently have any vested interest in believing that facilitated communication, despite all the evidence against it, is valid?

The more I’ve thought about this, however, the more sense it makes to me that parents of unfacilitated autistic children not only are susceptible to believing in FC, but actively support those whose children use it.

First, developments in the last few years reveal that large numbers of people are gullible, including major media outlets (see our FC in the media tab), the National Institutes of Health, and numerous autism experts. There’s little reason why parents of unfacilitated high-functioning autistic children should be any different.

Second, some parents of unfacilitated high-functioning children request accommodations that, while not going nearly as far as FC does, nonetheless lean towards FC. That is, while the sought-after accommodations mostly do not substitute the words of the student’s helper for the student’s own words, they do go a certain distance in that direction. And while the rationale behind these accommodations does not assume that there’s a verbally normal-to-way-above-normal mind locked inside a non-speaking individual, it often presupposes something similar.

Luisfer Valenzuela, via Wikimedia Commons

Many parents of unfacilitated autistic children, like the parents of facilitated children, are eager to get their kids out of special ed classes and into general ed classes, or (where possible), honors classes. Many would like to believe that, with proper academic accommodations, their children can handle honors-level assignments. This is particularly true in wealthy suburbs, home to some of the most competitive parents: people with the motivation and means to choose where to live based on the reputation of the local schools, particularly their honors programs. For many of these parents—whether or not their kids have special needs—failing to get their children into honors classes (as some have told me outright) is an embarrassment, a badge of shame—as much for the parents as for their children.

In other words, my child is at least as highly intelligent as his peers and just needs proper supports to allow that intelligence to emerge.

What about the supports themselves?

These include several that have what we might call “FC-adjacent” connotations and implications:

• Pictures and wordbooks to guide the child’s writing. The rationale is not that the child doesn’t know the words and their meanings, but that she simply has trouble retrieving them from memory. In other words, the words are there but are locked inside. Proponents of FC often use retrieval difficulties as an excuse for message-passing failure; RPM proponents also evoke it as justification for the facilitator’s prompts.

• Alternative ways of “demonstrating understanding.” In lieu of an essay, for example, a child might produce an illustration or cartoon. The rationale is that all kids understand: it’s just that some need a customized way of outputting that understanding. For some, it is a picture; for some, a travel brochure; for some, a puppet show; for some, extra time and/or a smaller “sample”, or subset, of the assigned work; for some, the option to retake a test of up to three times; for some, an aide who makes sure they understand directions, assignment prompts, and test questions, helps them organize their ideas, and keeps them on task; for many, some combination of all of the above. Especially when it comes to aides, who often end up (sometimes unintentionally or even unwittingly) doing a lot of the work for the student, it’s not too many steps to a facilitator holding up a letterboard.

• Outlines, keywords, and study guides (guides that often must contain everything that might later appear on a test). The rationale, again, is that while all kids have the linguistic skills to understand what they read and what’s discussed in class, some need help with organization and attention. This recalls another justification for the RPM facilitator: helping a distracted child stay organized and on task.

• Fill-in-the blank and multiple-choice questions instead of long-answer questions; a reduction in multiple choices from 4-5 to 3 or 2; the option to indicate choices with an index finger rather than filling in the bubble. Rationale: some students may have difficulty with expressive language but still understand the academic content; some may have handwriting or other motor difficulties that undermine their ability to answer long-answer questions or fill in or circle bubbles; some find too many multiple-choice options overwhelming. A child pointing to one of two or three multiple-choice answers recalls the initial stages of RPM, in which a child “demonstrates understanding” by pointing to one of two held-up fragments of paper with words on them.

These accommodations aren’t specific to honors classes or general education; they also routinely occur in special education classes, especially when students take state-mandated tests. Nor are competitive parents the other underlying factors.

The other players are the Powers that Be in the education world. These folks believe—or want the rest of us to believe—that academic goals should be based exclusively on students’ calendar ages. Only those with extreme cognitive disabilities—about 1 percent of the population—are exempt. Everyone else, the Powers that Be feel (or want the rest of us to feel), have it in them to meet these goals, so long as they are given adequate supports to demonstrate and output their understanding. The Powers that Be, in other words, are allied with many (though by means not all) special needs parents.

Second, there’s the reality of special education classrooms. Ideally, such settings allow tailored instruction optimized for each child, delivered via a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. In reality, many of these classrooms are hampered by a highly heterogeneous array of special needs that are hard even for the most talented, dedicated teachers to address simultaneously, and by the often highly unrealistic expectation that the teachers focus, not on material within their students’ zones of proximal comprehension, but on the one-size-fits-all goals for all students that happen to have the same calendar age. This, naturally, has many special ed parents, not just FC parents, thinking that a general education classroom with an aide and lots of accommodations might be preferable.

What all this leads to, at least among the more well-resourced, aspirational parents, is a broader alliance with broader goals than just FC parents promoting FC. And the bigger picture, in many quarters, is a Lake Wobegon scenario in which all the kids are above average. 

It’s just that some of these kids need extra support and facilitation in order for this to come to light.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Beech, M. 92010). Accommodations: Assisting Students With Disabilities. Learning Systems Institute Florida State University Bureau of Exceptional Education and Student Services Florida Department of Education Third Edition. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED565777.pdf

Florida Department of Education Bureau of Exceptional Education and Student Services and Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Education. (2005). Accommodations and Modifications for Students with Disabilities in Career Education and Adult General Education, https://cdnsm5-ss15.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_70176/File/Academics%20&%20Curriculum/Subjects/ESE/ese311201_acmod-voc.pdf

Hipsky, S. (2011). Differentiated Literacy and Language Strategies for the Elementary Classroom. Pearson.

Strauss, V. (2015, March 20). ‘You do not speak for our children.’ The Answer Sheet. Washington Post.

Should professors embrace ChatGPT and other LLMs?

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, thinks we should. In fact, he requires it, at least for certain assignments. Importantly, he also requires students to fact-check everything ChatGPT writes and holds them responsible for any errors they don't catch. He also provides students with guidelines about how to use Chat: specifically, how to ask it questions that produce useful responses. "More elaborate and specific prompts work better," he notes. He also offers suggestions on how to deal with the fact that Chat runs out of memory after about 3000 words.

Telling, the subtitle of the article that describes his approach is "A professor at the University of Pennsylvania embraces AI use in all his classes and has seen an increase in student success rates."

To some extent, this isn't surprising. Catherine Johnson and I have been looking at lots of output from ChatGPT and other LLMs and have found that most sentences are highly readable and well-connected. LLMs probably produce better prose than many people do, especially as a first draft (and I'm guessing that few people these days bother to go back and revise, especially when they have autocorrect and Grammarly catching many of their most egregious errors).

But LLM's are bad at other aspects of writing. All the sentences are about the same length and rotate through just a few sentence structures. Same with the paragraphs. The vocabulary tends toward the abstract, and the default tone is anodyne, wishy-washy, and preachy. Even if you suspend disbelief, you never feel like a real person is talking to you, anticipating your assumptions and questions and addressing them at just the right moment.

Mollick does note that "[p]roducing good AI-written material is not actually trivial." But his focus isn't on punching up the prose to make it more interesting and conversational, but on tweaking the prompts that generate the output. Post-production editing, for Mollick, appears to be limited to fact-checking the content.

As Molluck notes, "as a tool to jumpstart your own writing, multiply your productivity, and to help overcome the inertia associated with staring at a blank page, it is amazing." But is that how most people are using it? What if it's used, not just as a jumpstarter and brainstorming aide, but also as an articulator, organizer, and synthesizer.

The article asks: "Will the chatbots' technical proficiency make learning certain skills for humans obsolete?" But doesn't ask the follow-up question: will chatbots reduce people's motivation to go through what is perhaps the only process for learning certain skills--thinking skills, thought-articulation skills, thought-organizing skills, thought-connecting skills--namely, the process of putting one's thoughts in writing, from scratch, and synthesizing them into something new and interesting?

How might touch reduce the cognitive load of FCed typers?

Proponents of facilitated communication—specifically, of the classic, touch-based variant of FC—have come up with all sorts of reasons for why facilitators need to hold the wrists, arms, or other body parts of facilitated individuals while they type.

Per FC proponents, physical touch is used to

• provide physical stabilization (e.g., for tremors in the arm or finger)

• give tactile feedback (for those with deficits in body awareness)

• pull back or slow down the person’s typing hand (to prevent perseveration on letters and on letter sequences)

• keep typers calm and focused

• ·express emotional support.

Excluded from this list, of course, is the real reason for physical touch in FC: namely, that touch is how facilitators (however unwittingly) control the typed-out messages—i.e., by cueing the facilitated individuals about which letter to select.

In a recent article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, FC proponents[1] offer a novel justification for touch in FC (Nicoli, Pavon, Grayson, Emerson, & Mitra, 2023):

• reducing the “cognitive load” of the typer.

In particular, the authors declare, FC may reduce the typer’s “sensorimotor workload… thereby freeing up shared cognitive resources for the linguistic elements of the task.” The source of the sensorimotor workload? “Typing while sitting.”

Rodrigo O. Sanchez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The authors spend about 3000 words describing the myriad sensorimotor and complexities of typing while sitting—complexities that, though I am at this very moment doing precisely this (typing while sitting) I had no idea of. The next 2000 words discuss how concurrent motor and cognitive tasks like typing while sitting can potentially undermine one another (i.e., typing potentially undermines sitting, and sitting potentially undermines typing): a consequence of the cognitive resources they share, particularly in people with limitations in executive functioning (planning, working memory, and control of attention).

The next thousand words explain how touch can help with the postural control required when people type while sitting, “thereby reducing cognitive load” and freeing up resources for typing out appropriate, linguistically well-formed messages. The authors acknowledge that non-humans could also provide cognitive-load-reducing touch, as with the back of a chair or a robotic arm (they cite Oudin, 2007’s report of assisted typing via a mechanical arm, which Janyce discusses here). But only humans, they claim, can optimize the effects of touch by adjusting to shifts the typer makes in his posture or sitting position. Of course, humans are also better at unwittingly cueing linguistic messages than either mechanical arms or chair backs are.

The authors’ next two thousand words describe how developmental disabilities are associated with sensorimotor deficits and difficulties with executive functioning. A final section concludes that the facilitator’s touch may serve to free up cognitive resources for linguistic expression, or, in their words: “supportive touch might reduce the computational workload of generating and typing linguistic content by assisting the sensorimotor processes of typing.”

For all their extensive and seemingly comprehensive discussion of sensory-motor challenges, executive functioning challenges, and the presence of these challenges in individuals with developmental disabilities, nowhere do the authors mention the language and literacy challenges that also commonly come with developmental disabilities. Nowhere do the words “language,” “vocabulary,” “grammar,” “syntax,” or “literacy” appear. The word “word” is used only in the context of typed words; the word “linguistic” is used only to describe tasks and output, not difficulties; and the word “spelling” is used only in connection with tasks and recall, not in connection with whether a person actually has any spelling knowledge to recall.

Instead we get ruminations like:

Deficits in planning would limit the strategies available for organizing the content to be typed (narrating an event, answering a question…), deficits in verbal fluency would impair finding the lexical target of a conceptual referent, and working memory impairment would influence typing effectiveness at the sentence and word level. People with executive dysfunctions may find it difficult to maintain the to-be-typed sentence, or even the graphemic string…

The assumption, of course, is that non-speaking, developmental disabled individuals who depend on facilitation, however deficient their planning skills, however dysfluent their language, still have the linguistic ability to narrate events, answer questions, comprehend “lexical targets,” construct sentences, and sequence graphemes (letters) into words.

Nor do the authors mention the most likely way in which supportive touch might reduce computational workload: namely, by cueing the facilitated individuals about which letters to type. Such cues, experiments have shown, are ones that facilitators cannot help but convey, even if they’re completely unaware of doing so (see Spitz, 1997 for a review). This means that the most likely effect of supported touch is to free a facilitated person’s cognitive resources, not for the linguistic elements of the task, but from the linguistic elements of the task. The supportive touch, in other words, keeps the facilitated person from having to do any linguistic work at all.

Nor do the authors themselves do much linguistic work. Instead of discussing the various linguistic challenges that are likely to limit non-speakers with developmental disabilities, they expend their cognitive energies elsewhere, dazzling us with passages like these:

Visual information is particularly salient in the detection of self-motion as movements of the head through a visible environment generate flows of optical elements across the entire visual field (Lee and Lishman, 1975; Dijkstra et al., 1992). Anterior-posterior head motion produces radial optical flow whereas medial-lateral head motion generates lamellar flow (Warren, 2010). When these visual signals are available, the body sways less in both planes (Edwards, 1946; Paulus et al., 1984, 1989). Indeed, the ratio of body sway between eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions, the Romberg quotient, is a clinical indicator of postural stability (Romberg, 1853). Research suggests that the maintenance of balance (for example, keeping the body’s center of mass within the base of support) involves both exploratory and corrective body sway. Exploratory sway generates perceptual information (including optical flow) that guides the compensatory sway that corrects drifts toward instability (Riccio et al., 1993; Riley et al., 1997).

Dazzling the reader—and perhaps also the journal editors—with thickets of technical terminology and high-level concepts is reminiscent of Jaswal et al. (2020)’s pro-FC eye tracking paper. Head-mounted eye trackers, meticulous codings of hours of video, graphs of anticipatory eye gaze fixation patterns—all instead of a simple, low-tech message-passing test that would have settled matters once and for all.[2]

This paper’s introductory lit review, at least, acknowledges the long legacy of message-passing failures. But none of its subsequent claims about supportive touch can explain why facilitation fails when the facilitator doesn’t know what the facilitated person’s response should be. How, for example, would the facilitator’s touch fail to reduce cognitive load in cases where the facilitator hasn’t seen the image that the facilitated person is being asked about? The most this paper could explain, assuming its (untested) hypotheses are true, is why facilitated individuals are unable to type without the support of facilitators. But in no way does this explanation rule out facilitator control of letter selection. Indeed, as the authors themselves acknowledge: “The existence of the presented pathway for cognitive load reduction does not negate the possibility of specific cueing by the facilitator’s touch.”

But then they go on to propose that the most likely effects of the facilitator’s touch on the FCed person’s typing is a “co-creation” process that is analogous to someone who helps a mobility-impaired person walk, or to the scaffolding provided by a teacher in helping a student complete a not-yet-fully-mastered task.

Such analogies, however, collapse under scrutiny. A mobility-impaired person, assuming she can communicate independently, can tell you if you’re directing her somewhere she doesn’t want to go. And most students routinely undergo un-facilitated testing that establishes what they can do on their own. But when what’s being facilitated—and, quite likely, facilitator-controlled—is communication itself, and when facilitators and parents routinely refuse to allow un-facilitated (or facilitator-blinded) testing, there are no safeguards against “supportive touch” extending beyond mere support to out-and-out control.

---

NOTES

1. The two lead authors, Giovanni Nicoli, Giulia Pavon, are both members of, and received funding from, Vi Comunico Che Penso, described in the article as “a charitable organization whose mission includes supporting the development of facilitated communication.” Two other authors, Andrew Grayson and Anne Emerson, have a track record of pro-FC writing (see, e.g., Emerson, Grayson, & Griffiths, 2001). All five authors hail from Nottingham-Trent University, also home to Matthew Belmonte, another FC proponent.

2. Unsurprisingly, the authors reference Jaswal et al.’s paper: “Others have used eye-tracking methods (Grayson et al., 2012; Jaswal et al., 2020) to show that users anticipatorily fixate the to-be-typed key, and so are actively involved in the process.” More surprisingly, they cite FC critiques as sources on the use of FC to support typing: “A number of techniques seek to assist individuals with DD to type text on a keyboard or to point to textual or pictorial information on a screen by providing them with supportive touch on the torso or arm (Lilienfeld et al., 2014; Schlosser et al., 2014; Beals, 2022).” We are left wondering whether they actually read these articles.

REFERENCES

Emerson, A., Grayson, A., and Griffiths, A. (2001). Can’t or won’t? Evidence relating to authorship in facilitated communication. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 36 (s1), 98-103. DOI: 10.3109/13682820109177866

Jaswal, V. K., Wayne, A., and Golino, H. (2020). Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific Reports. 10:7882. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64553-9

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

Oudin, N., Revel, A., and Nadel, J. (2007). Quand une machine facilite l’écriture d’enfants non verbaux avec autisme. Enfance 59, 82–91.

Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages To Facilitated Communication. Routledge.