Talk:Rapid prompting method: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:44, 31 July 2019

Revision as of 13:56, 31 July 2019

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My own son is a mainly non-verbal autistic, and I understand that the mainstream person as well as the whole industry of Applied Behavioral Analysis sees these kids and adults as less cognitive. It's hard to rationalize that a person has a high functioning intellect when they display very feral behaviors. I myself as a parent also did not believe that my son would ever have any cognitive growth. Then I saw him giving answers via a letter board to mathematical and algebraic questions that he could not have known. He was always exposed to the ABA model, which considers that these people are the bottom of the barrel. He was never taught advanced algebra, or how to solve mathematical word problems, or calculus. But I watched him with my own eyes give answers that were no trick, and these answers even sometimes were more accurate than his mothers, who has two PHDs in mathematics and works as a machine learning programmer. I know it's counterintuitive to see a person as intelligent who deals with stress by throwing themselves on the floor, screaming, or incontinence. It is even harder to imagine them having a far superior mentality than most humans. However these people have no other way to express themselves with others. Imagine if you were of superior intelligence, but could not express this through language, and had only been taught infant skills at dealing with stress and frustration because of your inability to speak or communicate. Since they are not able to express themselves and since childhood have been seen as "delayed" or cognitively inferior, they have developed very constrained modes of displaying their displeasure at being treated as such. Most nonverbal autistics listen and learn at an accelerated rate, however since they cannot express this to the world, they are labeled as less. As a human race we are so limited in our styles and modes of acceptable communication we are not able to meet these people at this time on their own ground.

The [[Rapid_prompting_method|article below]] only has a basis on a limited point of view. I doubt the writers have actually gathered enough empirical evidence despite the citings to justify that this is a "pseudoscience" as the conclusion is drawn. Let me explain.

As far as the argument that the letter board has unconscious prompting, this can be disproved very easily. In our son's ongoing training using letter boards, my wife often gave, at first by accident, incorrect answers for mathematical questions to my son. He always gave her the correct answer even with multiple prompting and her belief that her answer was correct. If this can be seen in a non-scientifically controlled sample then I would argue that it could be easily proven with control blinds. Simply give the holder of the board the incorrect answer. This would disprove the theory that "prompting" affects an answer. Even so this "prompting" in itself if it does happen, which is possible, indicates evidence of cognition beyond a feral state. It takes a lot of intuition on the part of the prompted subject to watch a person's hand movements, however subtle, and find the indicated answer.

The [[Rapid_prompting_method|article below]] also does not explain that the letter boards are only the first step, with the final outcome being the subject being able to type independently on a typical QWERTY keyboard. The level of "prompting" needed to fake answers given via typing, if this were true in any case, indicates that the person has superior intuitive skills. I doubt most people could do it. The argument belowin the [[Rapid_prompting_method|article]] that this "prompting" makes the letter boards aan unproven method is absurd.

In the [[Rapid_prompting_method|article below]] the section "Prompt dependency" states:

''Prompts may include verbal reprimands, trial termination, physical redirection, slapping or shaking the letter board against the subject's face or chest, and blocking escape by positioning the subject between the table and walls.[1] Some of the verbal and gestural prompting procedures used in RPM are similar to the Pinchbeck Technique used by conjurers to "create the illusion of letter-by-letter communication."''

This section of the below [[Rapid_prompting_method|article]] states that the person is influenced by the teacher using techniques similar to what most educators use regularly to teach typical students as such as reward or punishment, examples of correct answers, etc. This method of teaching itself does not explain the result - the person that learns to communicate in this way can at the end of this training type on a keyboard answers on their own to complex questions. Any "failures" on the subjects part would be more highly attributed to misunderstanding the question or a lack of skill by the subject being acquired in the method. These training methods cited are also very poorly demonstrated and even abusive in nature, indicating that more modern methods have not been researched or added to the Empirical evidence. The stated arguments of the below article seem as well to have been taken from an only partial observation of the entire training, failing to understand the final goal - non-prompted individual output from the subject. This kind of output happens over and over after the mastery of this training.

I also understand that several articles have been removed from Wikipedia because they were written by nonverbal autistic individuals who were trained with this method. I think that kind of blatant assumption that these articles from nonverbal autistic writers are a lie based on faulty studies done 19 years ago is a dangerous case of biased censorship on the part of Wikipedia editors. I would say if this has actually occurred that Wikipedia has a responsibility to replace these submissions based on the faultiness of the logic this article seems to espouse.