FC USER AND FACILITATOR WRITE CHAPTER ON SUCCESSFUL EXPERIENCE WITH VALIDITY TESTING
by Alan Kurtz
Gene Marcus communicates with facilitation. In a packed room at the annual TASH conference in San Francisco, Gene eloquently described his struggle to succeed in a controlled evaluation of the validity of his communication.
At Gene's suggestion he and one of his facilitator's, Mayer Shevin, worked on learning how to succeed in an experimental protocol very similar to the one used by Wheeler, Jacobson, Paglieri, & Schwartz (1993). That study was done at the 0.D. Heck Center in New York State and is the most frequently cited study examining the validity of FC. 12 FC users in the O.D. Heck study were shown pictures in several conditions. ln one condition facilitators and users were shown pictures that were identical 5O% of the time and pictures different 50% of the time.
The results of the study at the O.D Heck Center failed to confirm the validity of any of the FC users' communication. None of the participants were able to type the names of pictures seen by the user and not by the facilitator. In some trials pictures seen only by the facilitator were described.
When Gene was first tested, his results were similar to those achieved by many of the participants in the Wheeler, Jacobson, Paglieri, & Schwartz (1993) study. He was unable to accurately label any of the pictures not seen by his facilitator. Gene did not, however, type the names of any pictures seen only by Mayer.
Three months later Gene took the test again - but this time after he had repeatedly practiced the test protocol with Mayer. (The pictures used in the second test were all new. They did not use the pictures he had been describing in the practice sessions.) This time Gene did very well. His most spectacular performance came in the condition in which he saw the same things as the facilitator half the time and different things half the time. In each of the six trials, Gene accurately identified the picture that he saw.
Even more interesting than these results was Gene's discussion of his difficulties with testing. Describing a picture in this kind of controlled setting apparently is much more difficult than one would assume. Gene's explanations are compelling and complex.
Among the insights conveyed by Gene in a prepared statement was this:
Years ago, I was writing words without any meaning. That kind of writings easily observed but not easily understood. The ways some researchers would study that would be to look for consistent bright paths through the jungle of my words. In other words, needing to find exactly what I know and don't know, do and don't do. But what I know better than they do is that consistency for me nearly always ensures loss of meaning. The more I do something the more it becomes robotic instead of thinking action.
A complete account of this study will be presented in Gene Marcus'
and Mayer Shevin's chapter "Sorting it out under fire: Our journey,"
in D. Biklen and D. Cardinal (Eds.), Presuming competence: Empirical
investigations of facilitated communication. New York: Teacher's
College Press, in press. The book should be available next
summer.
The purpose of Facilitated Communication In Maine is to promote the appropriate use of facilitated communication through education, technical assistance, and support to people with disabilities, parents, educators, speech and language pathologists support providers, and other interested individuals. The project provides up-to-date information on current best practices, introductory and advanced workshops on the technique, resources regarding theoretical and practical components of facilitated communication and ongoing support to a network of resource persons who provide local education and support to other facilitators.
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