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Katharine Beals

@katharinebeals.bsky.social

Author of "Students with Autism" and "Cutting-Edge Language and Literacy Tools for Students on the Autism Spectrum." Designer of the SentenceWeaver: interactive grammar instruction for students with autism. Adjunct at Temple, Drexel, and Penn.

120 Posts289 Follower152 Folgt
Zach Groshell@mrzachg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Education is full of myths. Facilitated communication may be the strangest: the belief that physical support from a facilitator could unlock hidden messages from cognitively disabled individuals. There was just one problem: it wasn’t true. educationrickshaw.com/2026/06/15/s...

S5E31: Katharine Beals on Facilitated Communication and Educational Pseudoscience

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell. Education is filled with myths. Some are harmless. Others shape curriculum, teacher training, intervention programs, and the l…

educationrickshaw.com

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Updated systematic review. STILL no evidence for Spelling to Communicate, Rapid Prompting Method, Spellers Method, etc., despite years of biased research by those with vested interests. Here is a pre-publication preprint: hdl.handle.net/1959.13/3216...

Systematic Review of Authorship in Rapid Prompting Method, Spelling to Communicate, and Variants: Outcomes, Significance and Clinical Implications

This is a systematic review of authorship in Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling2Communicate (S2C), Spellers Method and variants, techniques akin to Facilitated Communication which are increasingly promoted for use on autistic individuals or people with intellectual or developmental disabilities who are minimally- or non-speaking. In this systematic review, RPM/S2C or variants had to be evaluated as an intervention using a research design capable of empirical demonstration of authorship. The resulting empty review documents a persistent knowledge gap which, in the context of increasing popularity and similarity to Facilitated Communication, constitutes a finding with clinical significance. Controlled authorship trials of RPM, S2C, and Spellers Method are warranted. Given the instrumental similarities between RPM, S2C, Spellers Method, and traditional Facilitated Communication, these methods should be discontinued (if in use) or not adopted until independent authorship studies have shown that these methods are indeed valid. Ethical implications of the findings are also discussed.

hdl.handle.net

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Excited to be on this panel at the Boston Higashi School on April 14th. We'll be discussing why #RPM & #S2C are non- evidence-based communication rights violating schemes that should not adopted, despite the pressures from a highly influential group of parent promoters. www.wcvb.com/article/brit...

Brittany Johnson to Moderate Community Forum on Communication Access, Ethics, & Evidence: Examining Facilitated Communication in Autism Education

Brittany Johnson to Moderate Community Forum on Communication Access, Ethics, & Evidence: Examining Facilitated Communication in Autism Education

wcvb.com

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"In Cardinal’s email exchange with me, he indicated there was data left out of the final report... Sadly, he couldn’t provide that data to me when I asked... All I wanted to know was how many correct vs. incorrect responses were given in each of the conditions of their study."

FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Does Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 study prove authorship in FC (Part 5) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"Cardinal essentially sabotaged their goal of developing a protocol that “controlled for variables that could threaten the study’s validity” by giving facilitators & the people documenting the facilitated messages (called recorders) in the study access to the word list being used for test stimuli."

FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Does Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 Study Prove Authorship in FC - Part 4 (Facilitator Behaviors) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...

Caroline Bowen, Speech-Language Pathologist 🇦🇺🇳🇿🌻@carolinebowen.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🆕 Hemsley, B., Bryant, L., & Beals, K. (2026). Book Review: #GLP: Supporting Autistic and Neurodivergent Children with Natural Language Acquisition by Alison Battye. CLTT, doi.org/10.1177/0265... @bronwynhemsley.bsky.social @lucyebryant.bsky.social @katharinebeals.bsky.social 🦋 #bskySPEECHIES

Book Review: Gestalt Language Processing: Supporting Autistic and Neurodivergent Children with Natural Language Acquisition by Alison Battye - Bronwyn Hemsley, Lucy Bryant, Katharine Beals, 2026

doi.org

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"Despite claiming in their study that they “blinded” facilitators from the test stimuli, Cardinal et al. gave facilitators open access to the word list used in the testing & essentially sabotaged their own stated goal of “controlling for variables” & keeping facilitators “blind.”

FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Does Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 study prove authorship in FC? Part 3 (Competing for Words) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 7mo ago

"The HoloBoard, the HoloLens, the HoloGaze, the LetterBox: all of it rings so hollow. & it’s painful to think of how all the financial & intellectual capital that went into these projects might have been spent on to improve, rather than to diminish, the fragile lives of minimal speakers w/ autism."

FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Can HoloLens lessons liberate S2Ced individuals from their facilitators?--Plus a recap Jaswal et al.’s 2023-2025 virtual reality oeuvre www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/can-hol...

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 8mo ago

"It’s the actions ppl take after they access scientific evidence that counts the most. Do they go deeper into their belief system or do they follow the science? Do they take facilitator claims on face value? Or do they set up authorship testing before implementing the program?"

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 8mo ago

I’m not sure what this extremely slow letter selection process means, but it isn’t good news for those who wish to make claims about intact language comprehension and literacy in S2C-ed individuals.

FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Can Jaswal's "LetterBoxes" substitute for letter boards? www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/can-jas...

Can Jaswal’s “LetterBoxes” substitute for letterboards? — Facilitated Communication

Over the past couple of years, S2C proponent Vikram Jaswal, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the father of an S2C user , and Diwakar Krishnamurthy, Professor of Electrical an...

facilitatedcommunication.org

Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The only time the HoloBoard typing was definitively unprompted was when it occurred in solo mode. Only 5 kids could do that & all they did was spell short answers when asked to do so (name, home city, parents’ names, favorite movie, age). www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/can-jas...

Can Jaswal’s “HoloBoards” substitute for letterboards? Part II — Facilitated Communication

This post picks up where I left off in my discussion of a recent paper co-authored by Vikram Jaswal, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the father of an S2C user , and Diwakar ...

facilitatedcommunication.org