Does progressive education have to mean watered down math?

One of the most common criticisms of "progressive math", aka "reform math", is that the math itself is highly watered down--a natural consequence of the inefficiencies of child-centered discovery learning.

But every once in a while, I'm reminded that there are other incarnations of "progressive education" in which the math is anything but watered down.

My mother, for example, attended a self-proclaimed progressive private school in the 1950s where she got a very solid education in math (not to mention English, French, and history). In fact, a number of the algebra problems I've excerpted in my math comparison problems (comparing traditional U.S. math with Reform Math) came from her algebra book.

Now we have a very interesting article from this week's New Yorker about 3rd grade math at a progressive school in Chengdu, modeled after John Dewey. Here is one of the third grade math problems the author's twin took home with them:

While multiplying one two-digit number by another two-digit number, Little Sloppy misreads 22 as 25, and as a result his answer is higher than the correct answer by 69. What is the correct answer.

How many American 3rd graders can do this problem--no matter how "progressive" (or not) their math classes are?

Two years later, when the family returns to the U.S. but the twins continue to learn Chinese math through a remote tutor, they're doing problems like:

A certain number, when divided by 3, leaves a remainder of 2; when divided by 4, leaves a remainder of 3; when divided by 5, leaves a remainder of 4. What is the smallest that this number could be?

“Math is virtue"; “Math is a way to cultivate yourself," the author quotes the third grade math teacher as saying. 

America's "progressive math" proponents seem to see things differently.

Joyful classrooms?

Kathy Hirsch-Pasek's recent award of $19,980,000 from the LEGO Foundation reminds me of an earlier Out in Left Field post of mine, inspired by an earlier interview, in which Hirsch-Pasek says many of the same things that come up here. According to the Temple University news release on the LEGO award:

Professor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek thinks that playful learning can create a gateway to 21st Century skills needed in the workplace of tomorrow. Schools continue to operate on an "assembly line" model of learning fostered by the memorization of material-material that is available at the touch of a keyboard in the modern era. Professor Hirsh-Pasek and her long term collaborator Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware, along with an impressive cast of scientists, teachers and school administrators, offer an alternative. In their new book Making Schools Work, they chart how bringing active, engaged, socially interactive and joyful classrooms-or playful learning-can bring about deeper learning and joyful teaching. Their model has been piloted in schools in Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire, paving the way for a scaled-up, more sustainable study of the playful learning approach. 

Temple is proud to announce that the LEGO Foundation awarded Dr. Hirsh-Pasek and her team a five-year, $19.98 million grant to partner with school districts in four different states (California, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia), using their model to follow children from Pre-K through 4th grade.

For better or for worse, the grant is "prioritizing under-resourced schools."

It's not clear from this article what exactly Hisch-Pasek is offering in lieu of the "assembly line" model that schools purportedly continue to operate on, or how it is different from what is actually already happening in classrooms across the country:

The LEGO Foundation and Hirsh-Pasek share a common goal: to spread the benefits of learning through play by making real, systemic change to educational policies and institutions. The program follows a three-part equation, one that Hirsh-Pasek employs for her work in schools, communities (Playful Learning Landscapes) and digital media. 

"The first step is to respect cultural values and find out where the community values lie - what is important to parents, what do people care about?" notes Hirsh-Pasek. "In our research, and in the method that we're using for education, we bring parents and the community in as partners." 

The second takes the science of learning and morphs it into actual practice in real classrooms. Teachers and their coaches will learn the playful learning pedagogical approach and apply it to their existing curricula. The approach fosters a more active and collaborative relationship between students and educators, encouraging more small group work, more discussion, and a willingness to think about contexts for teaching material that is responsive to student interests.

The third and final part of the equation asks a key question: What does or should count as success for a school system?

It seems there's nothing new under the sun--just more of the kind of unstructured and group learning that especially disadvantages students with autism, plus a whole lot of vague language.

Along with an inconvenient, unanswered question: what if the community's values favor traditional instruction and academic skills over play-based education? 

So what I wrote earlier about the Hirsch-Pasek phenomenon is perhaps just as relevant now...

Today's progressivists regularly malign traditional education as being

based on a 19th century Prussian model, or an early 20th century factory model, designed to foster obedience to political, military, or capitalist authority. 

These people, as I've noted from time to time, are conflating political, military, and workplace authorities with educational authorities, and obedience to political, military, and workplace authorities with obedience to educational authorities.

There are some common elements that contribute to this conflation: all that lining up, all that waiting in silence, all that being yelled at or shamed for fidgeting during class or losing track of your belongings or having difficulty remembering complex instructions or daring to play tag or climb trees during recess. 

But other requirements--requirements like not disrupting the class, and attending to the educational authorities (competent teachers, decent textbooks) are essential to learning.

An NPR segment on the book "Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children," reminds me of two additional items--things that authors Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek join other would-be reformers in disparaging:

• sitting in rows
• spitting out facts

Here's Hirsh-Pasek:

If Rip Van Winkle came back, there's only one institution he would recognize: "Oh! That's a school. Kids are still sitting in rows, still listening to the font of wisdom at the front of the classroom."

…

We're training kids to do what computers do, which is spit back facts.  

How quickly people forget the virtues of row seating--even as they sit in rows in movie theaters or, say, during TED talks in which education gurus disparage row seating. Desks in rows is the only way to arrange a classroom so that a dozen plus kids can easily attend to the teacher, see what's being written on the blackboard, and take notes while using a hard surface (the surface of their desks) rather than their laps.

And how quickly people forget what it takes to learn things. "Spitting out" facts, while it should never be the be-all and end-all of education, is a key component of learning bodies of knowledge. The task of retrieving and articulating facts, when implemented well by competent teachers, is not a meaningless, rote repetition of disembodies chunks of information, but a way to strengthen long-term memory of meaningful systems of integrated knowledge--knowledge that is crucial to personal success and societal progress.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek compares the challenge of raising children to climate change.

What we do with little kids today will matter in 20 years. If you don't get it right, you will have an unlivable environment. That's the crisis I see.

I agree.

Why no one can learn their first language without engaging in joint attention behaviors

 In an earlier post I wrote about how FC proponents need to believe that autistic individuals (particularly non/minimal-speakers who use FC) are as socially motivated as non-autistic individuals. In this post, I’ll be returning to joint attention, the subject of several of my earlier posts on facilitatedcommunication.org. Like social motivation, joint attention is a topic that FC proponents are committed to having beliefs about. That’s because of the correlations between FC and minimal speech, minimal speech and autism severity, and autism severity and joint attention.

Those who are subjected to FC are minimal speakers; in autism, speech difficulties are correlated with autism severity. Autism severity is a function of severity of core autism traits; core autism traits include joint attention behaviors; core joint attention behaviors include following people’s eye gaze to attend to what they’re attending to.

What’s problematic for FC proponents are the myriad studies linking joint attention behaviors to language skills. Language skills include not just speaking skills, but also skills in comprehension and written language. If joint attention is a prerequisite for language skills in general, the severely autistic individuals who are subjected to FC are unlikely to have the skills to intentionally spell out the messages attributed to them or to understand what they’ve typed. This, of course, seriously undermines the legitimacy of FC.

But every once in a while an article comes along that claims that joint attention is not necessary for language acquisition, for example Akhtar and Gernsbacher (2007), which I critiqued here. Most recently, there’s an article by Schaeffer et al. (2023) entitled Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions. In this article, Schaeffer et al. review the literature on the various language challenges and the degree to which they are consequences vs. comorbidities of autism. While acknowledging that joint attention may facilitate language acquisition, Schaeffer et al. argue that it isn’t crucial. This conclusion is based on the following claims:

• Joint attention may not be impaired at birth, but instead declines between 2 and 6 months.

• Joint attention behaviors don’t predict subsequent language outcomes.

• The language difficulties in autism instead result from “difficulties integrating speech sounds and mouth movements… as part of early atypical sensory perception.”

• Many autistic children acquire fluent language.

• There are reports of autistic children who acquire languages through watching TV, which does not involve joint attention.

An alternative route to learning language, instead of joint attention and social interaction more generally, is statistical learning, or “the ability to effortlessly detect patterns and regularities in (auditory, visual or visuo-motor) input without explicit instruction or intention to do so.”

But while there is a grain of truth to these claims/observations, each one is problematic.

As far as the first claim goes, what’s unimpaired at birth isn’t joint attention, but looking at people’s eyes. According to Jones & Klin (2015), whom Schaeffer et al. cite on this:

[E]ye looking--is not immediately diminished in infants later diagnosed with ASD [autism spectrum disorder]; instead, eye looking appears to begin at normative levels prior to decline. The timing of decline [at somewhere between 2 and 4 months] highlights a narrow developmental window and reveals the early derailment of processes that would otherwise have a key role in canalizing typical social development.

Among the processes derailed by declining eye looking is joint attention, which develops closer to 9 months. So much for joint attention starting out unimpaired.

As far as the second claim goes, it is true that other factors besides joint attention predict language outcome in autism. Two factors that have proved important are imitation skills and non-verbal IQ. Furthermore, there are exogenous factors like language interventions: What kind of language instruction did a child experience? How early did it begin? How intensive was it?

But the existence of other factors does not mean the joint attention isn’t also a factor. Which factor is most important varies, a function of at least four additional factors:

1. Which subpopulation within the autism spectrum we’re talking about (e.g., minimally speaking or only moderately language delayed)

2. Which aspects of language we’re talking about (e.g., speech or comprehension; basic nouns or phrases and sentences)

3. Which phase of language learning we’re talking about (e.g., early language learning or later-stage learning)

4. Whether we’re talking about first-language learning or second-language learning.

In Schaeffer et al.’s article, all of these factors come into play, and the result is a very confused discussion.

Some of the studies Schaeffer et al. cite find joint attention to be one of several factors in language outcome, with non-verbal IQ being the main other player (Anderson et al., 2007; Bennett et al., 2015; Thurm et al., 2015; Weismer & Kover, 2015). Anderson et al. find that, while joint attention is crucial for those who are the most language impaired, for those who are the most linguistically advanced, only non-verbal IQ predicts outcome. Bennett et al., which only measured correlates of joint attention, and did so indirectly via a parent survey (the “social” domain of the Vinland Adaptive Behavior Scale, or VABS-II), found social factors to be only important early in language development. Weismer & Kover looked at autism severity as measured by the calibrated severity score of the ADOS (the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, a standard measure of autism symptom severity, including diminished joint attention). They found autism severity to be a significant predictor for language comprehension and production (where production means speech). But they also found that cognitive skills are a significant predictor, specifically, of language production. Thurm et al., finally, focused on minimally verbal preschoolers and on production—i.e., speech. They found that the social component of the calibrated severity score of the ADOS predicted who would develop “phrase speech”, or the ability to spontaneously combine multiple words into meaningful phrases. But they also found that when they took non-verbal IQ scores into account, only these were predictive of phrase speech.

None of these findings contradict longstanding conclusions about the special role that joint attention plays where it matters the most for language learning: at the earliest stages of language acquisition, where kids learn basic nouns.  Learning the meanings of these early words—“Daddy,” “cup,” “dog,” “fish”—means looking at what speakers who use these words are pointing to or looking at. And looking where people are pointing or looking is the essence of joint attention. To learn basic nouns on your own, without explicit instruction, you need joint attention.

Not surprisingly, therefore, those studies that focus on the learning of basic nouns in autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1997), find a key role for joint attention.  When a researcher took an object out of her bag, looked at it, and labeled it, the non-autistic participants looked up, engaged in joint attention (i.e., looked where the researcher is looking) and learned the label. Not so with the participants with autism. They instead mis-learned the meaning of the noun label, assuming it referred to a different object: the one that they had in own their hands.

True, learning basic nouns is only a tiny part of language development. But it is also a crucial one. Basic nouns are the building blocks for the rest of language. You can’t learn verbs and prepositions before you learn nouns. You can’t learn abstract nouns before you learn basic nouns. You can’t combine words into novel sentences before you learn basic nouns. And it’s in learning basic nouns that you start seeing how language is a public communication system that plugs into the real world—into concepts and categories that are based on real-world phenomena. No one can master their first language without going through an initial phase in which they learn how to map basic nouns to the objects and categories that people conventionally use them to refer to.  

But Schaeffer et al. question Baron-Cohen et al.’s conclusions. They point out that the autistic participants, even though they failed to engage in joint attention, must have already learned some words. That’s because they were matched with the non-autistic participants on vocabulary skills. And so, Schaeffer et al. conclude, autistic individuals must be able pick up the meaning of words without joint attention. But they overlook four important details:

Joint attention isn’t an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Individuals with autism often do show joint attention behaviors; just significantly less frequently, sometimes considerably less frequently, than non-autistic people do.

In particular, even if an autistic person never engages in joint attention when someone labels one object when they’re preoccupied with another (as was the case in the Baron-Cohen experiment), they may still engage in joint attention when they aren’t preoccupied with another object and/or when someone explicitly calls their attention to something (e.g., “Hey, look—a fish!”, accompanied by an explicit pointing gesture).

Even those who rarely engage in joint attention may still learn words through explicit instruction (including through explicit pointing, but also through computerized instruction, where joint attention isn’t an issue).

Finally, the participants in Baron-Cohen et al.’s study were compared to children with cognitive impairments, not to typically developing children.

Schaeffer et al. also note that “there is no unambiguous evidence that intervention techniques specifically targeting joint-attention skills have an effect on language outcomes.” But there’s a simple reason for this that has nothing to do with a lack of connection between joint attention and language acquisition: joint attention skills turn out to be extremely difficult to teach.

Now let’s turn to Schaeffer et al.’s third claim: that the language difficulties in autism instead result from “difficulties integrating speech sounds and mouth movements… as part of early atypical sensory perception.” These “sensory” difficulties, though, may be superficial manifestations of deeper social difficulties: multiple studies, for example Jones and Klin (2008), show that autistic infants as young as six months old have reduced rates of orienting to social stimuli, including to voices and mouths. These difficulties are precursors to difficulties with joint attention.

Schaeffer et al.’s fourth claim, that many autistic children acquire fluent language, overlooks how this lends support for a role of joint attention in language skills. Greater linguistic fluency is associated with milder autism, which in turn is associated with more frequent joint attention skills. The more frequent the joint attention, the faster the acquisition of those basic nouns that are the foundation for the rest of language learning, and the sooner the rest of language learning is set in motion.

Schaeffer et al.’s fifth claim concerns autistic individuals who acquire languages exclusively by watching TV. Watching TV, of course, doesn’t involve real-world joint attention behaviors.  Nonetheless, there are several problems with the language-learning-via-TV-watching data as grounds for conclusions about the role of joint attention in language learning.

The first is that none of Schaeffer et al.’s references on language-learning-via-TV-watching involve what most people are referring to when they talk about joint attention in the context of language learning: individuals learning their first language. Most people, even children, learn second languages quite differently from first languages, and often in ways that involve fewer-to-no joint attention behaviors.

One of Schaeffer et al.’s  references (Vulchanova et al., 2012), however, does provide a quite striking case study: a Bulgarian girl with autism who, by watching German-language children’s programs on a German TV channel starting at age 3, learned enough German by age 9 to show “advanced levels of German competency” and to be enrolled in a German-language immersion school. However, she was also advanced in her native language, which she learned in the real-world environment. Thus, she’d already undergone that joint attention-mediated process of learning how language is a public communication system that plugs into real-world objects and categories. Secondly, she may be a highly unusual case: Schaeffer et al. cite no similar examples. Third, her astounding feat has reportedly been replicated by another girl who isn’t autistic: a Finnish six-year-old who gained a good command of spoken English after watching English-language cartoons for two years (Jylhä‐Laide, 1994). Third, TV-mediated language doesn’t rule out something like joint attention: camera angles permitting, one can still follow the characters’ eyes or pointing gestures over to the objects they’re referring to.

Another of Schaeffer et al.’s references, Kissine et al. (2019), cite their own study-in-progress of autistic children who acquire a second language “from exposure to the internet.” While noting that their data is still preliminary, Kissine et al. mention a twelve-year-old autistic boy who attends a French-language primary school in Belgium and whose familial environment is exclusively French speaking. This boy has acquired, via English-language videos on the Internet, a level of English on par with his French. Kissine et al. also cite Christopher, a linguistic savant who has “demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn new languages from limited exposure and with a preference for written input.” But again, learning second languages, particularly as an older person, is qualitatively different from learning a first language. Nor does it require that preliminary step of plugging language into the real world via real-world joint attention. Indeed, for second language learning in late childhood and beyond, a dictionary will do just as well, especially if you’re learning through written input. And, finally, some people excel at mastering second languages, including from written or recorded input alone—whether or not they have an autism diagnosis.

The other examples of TV-mediated, purportedly joint attention-free language learning are much less impressive: they’re all about picking up another dialect of an already acquired first language rather than learning a new language. There are autistic children in Tunisia, raised with colloquial Arabic, who learn the standard dialect of Arabic by hearing it on TV (Kissine et al., 2019). And there is the young Bulgarian girl who, in addition to learning German from TV, also acquired, presumably through TV as well, a much more formal, standard Bulgarian than the local dialect that surrounded her. But picking up dialect from TV does not require joint attention; only careful listening and accurate imitation—other skills that aren’t specific to autism.

The source for Schaeffer et al.’s final claim, that autistic individuals follow an alternative route to learning language, is Kissine (2021). Kissine proposes that autistic individuals are inclined toward statistical learning, or what he he elaborates as the “domain-general capacity to detect the distribution of structural properties.” This, he proposes, is the result of the “strong systemizing skills” that some (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2009) have linked to autism.

But all Kissine’s examples of statistical learning in language acquisition pertain to formal, structural aspects of language that have no more to do with joint attention than do the analogous aspects of a musical composition or a computer language:

• Carving the acoustic sound stream into distinctive sounds (phonemes)

• Carving a sequence of phonemes into distinct words

• Identifying and internalizing a language’s complex structures.

Contrary to what Kissine suggests, none of these learning targets has a well-trodden social route for those without autism, namely, one involving “communicative, referential intentions.” True, one might get better at carving a sound stream into phonemes by imitating other people: by “mirroring and then adapting the phonological templates used by adults.” But this kind of imitation does not require joint attention. Rather, it requires a different kind of attention that, as noted above, is also diminished in autism: attending to speech sounds. But attending to speech sounds is also required for acquiring phonemes through statistical learning.

None of this diminishes the importance of joint attention in the aspect of language for which it’s most crucial: the meanings of basic nouns in one’s first language.

Kissine concludes by saying:

It could be that, because of the unavailability of socio-communicative cues, at least some autistic individuals learn language exclusively by relying on probabilistic, associative processes.

This may work fine for processing speech into phonemes and words. But as for learning the meanings of words, as Simon Baron-Cohen et al. showed, relying on joint attention-free statistical associations can frequently lead you astray. Joint attention-free statistical associations may cause you to connect together two salient, co-occurring stimuli in the environment that aren’t, in fact, meaningfully related—e.g., the object you’re holding and the word that someone happens to be saying while you’re holding it—instead of looking up at the speaker and seeing what they’re using the word to refer to. The result is an incorrect mapping between the word and the world—and a failure to learn the word’s meaning.

Putting it all together:

• Joint attention is essential for the first steps of language learning: learning the meanings of basic nouns in your first language.

• Cognitive skills also play a role in language learning, particularly later-stage language learning and formal aspects of language.

• Imitations skills are another factor (see also Pecukonis, et al. 2019, who look at minimally speaking autistic children).

• Where speech is concerned, motor skills are important as well.

Joint attention skills, while only one of many factors, are a crucial first step in first-language learning. Unless you’ve learned the meanings of basic nouns, you can’t learn verbs, prepositions, abstract aspects of language, or how to put words together into sentences. And there’s no way to learn the meanings of basic nouns without looking where people are looking when they use them—i.e., without joint attention.

---

REFERENCES

Anderson, D. K., Lord C., Risi, S., DiLavore, P. S., Shulman, C.,  Thurm, A., Welch, K., & Pickles, A. (2007). Patterns of growth in verbal abilities among children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75.594–604. DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.75.4.594.                                                                                                            

Akhtar, N., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2007). Joint Attention and Vocabulary Development: A Critical Look. Language and linguistics compass, 1(3), 195–207. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00014.x

Baron-Cohen, S., Baldwin, D. A., & Crowson, A. (1997). Do children with autism use the speaker’s direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language? Child Development 68.48–57. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb01924.x

Baron-Cohen, S. (2009). "Autism: The Empathizing–Systemizing (E-S) Theory". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1156 (The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009): 68–80. Bibcode:2009NYASA1156...68B. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04467.x.

Bennett, T. A., Szatmari, P., Georgiades, K., Hanna, S., Janus, M., Georgiades, S.,  Duku, E., Bryson, S., Fombonne, E., Smith, I.M., et al. (2015). Do reciprocal associations exist between social and language pathways in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 56.874–83. DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12356

Ellis Weismer, S., & Kover, S. T. (2015). Preschool language variation, growth, and predictors in children on the autism spectrum. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 56.1327–37. DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12406

Jones, W., & Klin, A. (2008). Altered salience in autism: Developmental insights, consequences and questions. In E. MacGregor, M. Nunez, K. Cebula, & J. C. Gomez (Eds.), Autism: An integrated view from neurocognitive, clinical and intervention research (pp. 62–82). Blackwell.

Jones W. & Klin. A (2013) Attention to eyes is present but in decline in 2–6-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism. Nature 504(7480):427–431. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12715

Jylhä‐Laide, J. (1994) Learning by Viewing: cartoons as foreign language learning material for children‐‐a case study, Journal of Educational Television, 20:2, 93-109, DOI: 10.1080/0260741940200204

Kissine M (2021) Autism, constructionism, and nativism. Language 97:e139–e160

Kissine M, Lun X, Aiad F, Bourourou R, Deliens G, Gaddour N (2019) Noncolloquial Arabic in Tunisian children with autism spectrum disorder: a possible instance of language acquisition in a noninteractive context. Lang Learn 69(1):44–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12312

Kissine M, Bertels J, Deconinck N, Passeri G, Deliens G (2021) Audio-visual integration in nonverbal or minimally verbal young autistic children. J Exp Psychol 150:2137–2157. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001040

Pecukonis, M., Plesa Skwerer, D., Eggleston, B., Meyer, S., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2019). Concurrent social communication predictors of expressive language in minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 49.3767–85. DOI: 10 .1007/s10803-019-04089-8.

Schaeffer, J., Abd El-Raziq, M., Castroviejo, E., Durrleman, S., Ferré, S., Grama, I., Hendriks, P., Kissine, M., Manenti, M., Marinis, T., Meir, N., Novogrodsky, R., Perovic, A., Panzeri, F., Silleresi, S., Sukenik, N., Vicente, A., Zebib, R., Prévost, P., & Tuller, L. (2023). Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions. Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996), 130(3), 433–457. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-023-02592-y

Thurm, Audrey; Stacy S. Manwaring; Lauren Swineford; and Cristan Farmer. 2015. Longitudinal study of symptom severity and language in minimally verbal children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 56.97–104. DOI: 10 .1111/jcpp.12285.

Vulchanova, M., Talcott, J. B., Vulchanov, V., & Stankova, M. (2012). Language against the odds, or rather not: The weak central coherence hypothesis and language. Journal of Neurolinguistics 25.13–30. DOI: 10.1016/j .jneuroling.2011.07.004.

 

It's not just non-cognitive skills that are (supposedly) undervalued

In an old post, I argued that our obsession with the shortcomings of IQ and other aptitude tests and our infatuation with "non-cognitive" skills ("grit", "emotional intelligence," "leadership") has us forgetting a number of cognitive skills: cognitive skills that aren’t measured by IQ and other aptitude tests, but that nonetheless factor into intelligence. These include:

--attention and observation: how much of the world around you do you sponge up?

--curiosity: do you notice what you don’t know and care enough to seek answers—asking, listening, reading widely and in depth?

--your patterns of reflecting later on what you learned earlier (regular recall and reflection promotes long-term memory)

--the breadth of topics your mind ranges over: does it brood on a narrow range of fixed topics or does it wander widely and to new places?

--the breadth of new connections—logical, analogical, relational—that your mind makes among the things it ranges over.

All these factors feed into phenomena we clearly appreciate, in real life, as part of intelligence: the volume, organization, and connectedness of the facts someone knows, or how interesting, astute, and/or creative their questions, observations, and ideas are.

It's popular to claim that we overvalue cognitive skills and don't pay enough attention to other intelligences (social, emotional, body-kinesthetic) or to mindsets (growth, grit).

But, as I argue in this old post, there are cognitive skills out there that may get less attention than all of these.

But I left out one big cognitive factor that also isn't measured by IQ: rationality. Discussed at length in the works of psychologist Keith Stanovich (I'm indebted to a fellow linguist for alerting me to this research!), it includes the tendency to think a lot; to think, before acting, about the consequences of one’s actions; to be open-minded and objective; to eschew superstition and dogma; and to consider multiple perspectives, pros and cons, and nuance. It's also a function of certain types of knowledge: e.g.,  knowledge of statistics and scientific reasoning; awareness of the various common logical fallacies and self-serving biases to avoid.

As Stanovich notes in his chapter on Intelligence and Rationality (for the Cambridge handbook of intelligence):

Critics of intelligence tests are eager to point out that the tests ignore important parts of mental life—many largely noncognitive domains such as socioemotional abilities, empathy, and interpersonal skills, for example. However, a tacit assumption in such critiques is that although intelligence tests miss certain key noncognitive areas, they do encompass much of what is important in the cognitive domain.

But, though people often "define intelligence in ways that encompass rational action and belief," intelligence tests are “radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning” and completely neglect rationality.

Nor does rationality simply capture how much you resemble Mr. Spock. Rationality is a major determinant of whether people set reasonable goals and make reasonable decisions and judgments, and so is integrally connected with their happiness--and with that of those around them.

Stanovich makes a good case for the teachability of certain sub-skills of rationality--a much better case, indeed, that others have made for the teachability of non-cognitive skills. Stanovich also lays out a number of specific proposals about how one might go about teaching these skills.

But are schools likely to listen? Why should they? After all, it's so much easier to pretend to teach non-cognitive skills than it is to actually teach cognitive ones.

Are autistic individuals really as socially motivated as the rest of us?

 Autistic individuals are just as socially motivated as the rest of us. For FC believers, this has to be true. Indeed, it’s one of the foundations of the FC belief system: autism must be a sensory-motor/motor-planning/praxis disorder and not the socio-cognitive disorder that decades of clinical observation, research, and standardized diagnostic criteria have firmly established autism—or,  more precisely, autism spectrum disorder—to be.

Further committing FCers to social motivation being intact in autism is the content of many FC-generated messages. Let’s look, for example, at the testimonials cited in “Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism” (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2018—see our critique here). Five of these testimonials are attributed to FCed individuals—Jamie Burke, Alberto Frugone, Naoki Higashida, Ido Kedar, and Amy Sequenzia—and allude to:

• “my desire for friends” (Jamie Burke)

• “the social person that inside me I wanted to be” (Alberto Frugone)

• “the truth” that “we'd love to be with other people” (Naoki Higashida)

• “a big misconception” of liking objects more than people (Ido Kedar)

• the appearance of lack of social interest as “only a self-preservation mask.” (Amy Sequenzia)

Most articles offering support for a redefinition of autism avoid Jaswal and Akhtar’s problematic reliance on anecdotes and even more problematic reliance on testimony generated by FC. There is, for example, the Gernsbacher oeuvre that we critiqued over the course of last year, beginning with this post. And there’s a recent article about motor difficulties in autism that we critiqued here. The problems with these articles are considerably more subtle than those on display in Jaswal and Akhtar (2018).

But a recent article on social motivation is much more problematic. This article, Mournet et al. (2023), finds that “Autistic participants had significantly greater motivation/desire to connect with others compared to non-autistic participants.”

Greater social motivation in autism? How did the researchers reach this conclusion?

Inklings of the answer are seen in the participants. No, they were not FCed, but Mournet et al. recruited them online and included as eligibility requirements being “able to read and understand English” and being “a legally independent adult.” In other words, all but the highest functioning fraction of the autism spectrum were excluded. Second, as Mournet et al. acknowledge, the participants were disproportionately female (the autism spectrum is about four-fifths male). Third, the autistic half of the sample was determined based on self-reports of autism. Such self-reports (though Mournet et al. don’t mention this) are highly unreliable: they potentially include significant numbers of individuals who have diagnosed themselves as autistic, but who don’t actually meet the diagnostic criteria. The phenomenon of autism fakery, in fact, dates back decades.

Then there’s the issue of “social motivation.” Mournet et al. attempted to assess this through “a battery of self-report measures,” culminating in two scales: a Connection with Others Scale (CWOS) scale and slightly modified Connecting with Others Scale, Autistic Version (CWOS-AV). These scales, which Mournet et al. devised based on feedback from their participants, had subjects rate themselves from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” on eight items. The eight items on the CWOS-AV (very similar to those on the CWOS) are:

1. I am part of a group of friends

2. I value talking with other people

3. I want to interact with people who are similar to me

4. I want to interact with people who have similar interests as me

5. I want to get to know other people

6. I enjoy interacting with people who are different than me

7. I spend time with other people

8. I value interacting with people who are different than me

The most obvious problem here is the inherent unreliability of self-rating scales, particularly when they probe subjective factors like enjoyment.

But there’s a second problem: the problem of construct validity, or of reducing social motivation to this handful of specific items. For all the adjustments Mournet et al. made based on participant feedback, it remains unclear to what degree these eight items collectively capture social motivation, which the researchers never actually define.

One way to characterize social motivation is in relative terms: how strong someone’s social motivation is compared to their other motivations. Indeed, empirical studies of autism are often about relatives rather than absolutes: e.g., preferences for non-social over social stimuli, or (contrary to Ido Kedar’s FCed message) for objects over people.

But none of the CWOS items probe preferences, or comparative levels of motivation, as in “I enjoy spending time with people more than I enjoy pursuing my solo hobbies.” A person might enjoy interacting and spending time with people and “strongly agree” that this accurately characterizes them, while still strongly preferring to tinker with electric outlets or read books about Ancient Rome. Indeed, as I found in a review of memoirs by high-functioning autistic individuals—the basis for Chapter 8 of my book Students with Autism—these people often crave social connection but are, first and foremost, obsessed with non-social pursuits.

Mournet et al. also fail in another sort of comparison: a comparison of their findings with those of contradictory studies. They do state that “it is necessary to acknowledge the social motivation theory of autism”: the notion that autism involves diminished, rather than higher-than-average, social motivation. But they mention only two of the many papers that provide evidence for diminished social interest (namely, Chevallier et al., 2012 and Chevallier et al., 2013). And instead of engaging with the content of these papers, they change the subject to another paper: a more favorable one that’s also based on internet survey data (Maitland et al., 2021), and which they mischaracterize as claiming that autistic individuals “report feelings of social identification with at least one group.”

What Maitland et al. actually report is this:

In total, 184 autistic adults completed an online survey with questionnaires about their demographics, social groups and mental health. The results found that autistic adults reported on their social groups similarly to non-autistic people.  There was a variety in the types and numbers of groups that autistic adults identified with. Some participants reported having no groups that they identified with, whereas others reported up to four groups. [Boldface added]

Returning to Mournet et al., they do acknowledge that their recruitment process “limits generalization to the broader population of autistic adults.” But this does not inspire them to temper their conclusion:

Autistic participants had significantly greater scores on both versions of the CWOS, demonstrating higher levels of motivation, desire, enjoyment, and value associated with connecting with others. This provides clear evidence in contradiction of the social motivation theory of autism” and that “the social motivation theory of autism cannot be generalized to all autistic people, or even most autistic people, as is also emphasized by Jaswal and Akhtar (2018).

A more appropriate conclusion would have been this:

Individuals with autism who are high functioning enough to live independently and socially motivated enough to respond to internet-based recruitment efforts and participate in surveys of their social interests are… socially motivated. In particular, they enjoy interacting with people.

Not a big surprise.

And nowhere near the kind of evidence that warrants an FC-friendly redefinition of autism.

REFERENCES

Chevallier, C., Grèzes, J., Molesworth, C., Berthoz, S., & Happé, F. (2012). Brief report: Selective social anhedonia in high functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(7), 1504–1509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-011-1364-0

Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S., & Schultz, R. T. (2012). The social motivation theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(4), 231–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.02.007

Maitland, C. A., Rhodes, S., O'Hare, A., & Stewart, M. E. (2021). Social identities and mental well-being in autistic adults. Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 25(6), 1771–1783. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211004328:

Mournet, A., Bal, V., Selby, E. A., & Kleiman, E. (2023, February 27). Assessment of multiple facets of social connection among autistic and non-autistic adults: Development of the Connections With Others Scales. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/d6t5k

Jaswal, V. K., & Akhtar, N. (2018). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 42, e82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18001826

 

The National Institutes of Health continues to platform facilitated communication

 Here is their summary of recent National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) webinar, which was last updated on April 7th. Despite receiving evidence-backed criticism of their misrepresentation of non-speaking individuals with autism and their platforming of facilitated communication, they continue to:

1. Advocate for " engag[ing] non-speaking individuals... as collaborators at all research stages, including conceptualizing, planning, implementing, interpreting, and disseminating research."*
2. Link to a highly-flawed eye-tracking study that purports to show evidence of authorship in a variant of FC that is known as Spelling to Communicate and that has been used with the lead author's daughter.**
3. Link to a movie that platforms non-speaking individuals with autism who use FC and that was produced by the FC-promoting organization CommunicationFirst, whose executive director is the wife of the lead author of the eye-tracking study.

*Given that the receptive language skills of non-speakers with autism are highly limited (unless we expand "non-speaking" to include those who merely prefer not to speak), this pipedream could only be realized through the kind of pretend engagement made possible by facilitated communication.

**A quote from the lead author, Vikram Jaswal, appears in this excerpt from the above-linked Washington Post article:

"When Helen Keller first learned to communicate, no one believed her,” said Vikram Jaswal, a University of Virginia psychologist who has an elementary-aged daughter with autism who he said is learning to spell to communicate."

There appear to be some powerful people at the NIH with a vested interest in promoting facilitated communication at taxpayer expense--no matter the terrible costs to some of our most vulnerable citizens.

The Every Student* Succeeds Act

 *except for those with cognitive disabilities.

Why is it so difficult to provide appropriate instruction to students with cognitive disabilities? Why aren't teachers free to instruct students at their ability levels? Why are students with cognitive disabilities forced to read chapter books, or add fractions, or write five-paragraph essays, at the same time as everyone else who happens to have been born in the same calendar year that they were? And why are only 1% of students with the most severe cognitive disabilities exempted?

Only recently did I stumble upon the law responsible for this. In fact, I'd forgotten (if I ever knew) that there was such a law.

Naturally, it's called the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about its treatment of students with disabilities:

Most students with disabilities will be required to take the same assessments and will be held to the same standards as other students. ESSA allows for only one percent of students, accounting for ten percent of students with disabilities, to be excused from the usual standardized testing. This one percent is reserved for students with severe cognitive disabilities, who will be required to take an alternate assessment instead. This is a smaller percentage of students than under past mandates, mainly because there is not enough staff available to administer the assessments to the students one-on-one.

There you have it. This is not, ultimately, about student learning, but about the logistics of test administration--tests that have taken on a life of their own, at the expense of everything else.