EBD Blog

Some of our favored ideas in education are supported by virtually no reliable data. Learning styles and multiple intelligences are among them, and I imagine you’ll find those ideas debunked in special education blogs related to this one.

An edited book, just published, challenges us to think carefully about some popular ideas and interventions. The book is Controversial Therapies for Developmental Disabilities: Fad, Fashion, and Science in Professional Practice, edited by the late John W. Jacobson, Richard M. Foxx, and James A. Mulick (and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005). I am a great admirer of this book, not merely because I co-authored a chapter in it on the topic of full inclusion but because I believe it offers us a serious challenge to think about why we believe what we do. Along with another excellent volume, Clear Thinking with Psychology: Separating Sense from Nonsense (by John Ruscio, published in 2002 by Wadsworth), it urges us to be skeptics about popular notions in psychology and education.

The Jacobson, Foxx, and Mulick book contains chapters on the following intervention-specific issues:

• Person-Centered Planning (by J. Grayson Osborne)
• Sensory Integrative Therapy (by Tristram Smith, Daniel W. Mruzek, & Dennis Mozingo)
• Auditory Integration Training (by Oliver C. Mudford & Chris Cullen)
• Facilitated Communication (by John W. Jacobson, Richard M. Foxx, & James A. Mulick)
• Positive Behavior Support (James A. Mulick & Eric Butter)
• Nonaversive Treatment (by Crighton Newsom & Kimberly A. Kroeger)
• Gentle Teaching (by Chris Cullen & Oliver C. Mudford)

I didn’t give you the subtitles of the chapters, some of which you may see as pointedly uncomplimentary, particularly if you are fond of the intervention about which the authors are writing.

One intervention that is particularly popular just now, and one for which we might find even a legislative foundation, is Positive Behavior Support, often known as PBS (and not to be confused with public broadcasting). I’ve got to admit that some of my colleagues in special education–people I like a lot and whose work I admire–are quite taken with the practice of PBS. But is it (a) a new idea or concept and (b) a practice supported by scientific evidence?

PBS is important for all of special education, but particularly for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. I’ll address the “new” and “scientific” issues regarding PBS in a future post by summarizing the points made by Mulick and Butter in their chapter. I’ll also have some things to say about punishment and nonaversive interventions.