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SummaryGary Thomas’ interesting paper (Thomas, 2002) raises issues which are relevant to both the theory and the practice of educational psychology. Whilst the author is sympathetic to his general thesis, there are still issues which are obscure. This paper attempts to offer a reply to some of these and to stimulate further debate amongst both researchers and practitioners.Psychological Explanations: A replyThomas’ central point is a negative one: that appeal to some supposed psychological faculty does nothing to explain behaviour. Opium induces sleep, but to say that it does so because of a virtus dormitiva (something sleep-inducing) tells us nothing; similarly, according to Thomas (p. 164 ff.), children’s inability to read cannot be usefully ascribed to some supposed faculty or construct, ‘phonological awareness’, which somehow underlies their performance and which the children lack. But, like many other writers, he takes this to be an empirical thesis (“findings consistent with the thesis being advanced here have come repeatedly from research over the past two or three decades”, p. 165); as if it were logically possible for it to be false. In this he follows those whom he criticises (Farnham-Diggory, 1992; Goswami & Bryant, 1990): it is as if he disagreed with them about a matter of fact, about what is actually the case although it might have been otherwise.The connection between what is supposed to explain and what is supposed to be explained in such cases is a conceptual and not an empirical one. Just as part of the meaning of virtus dormitiva is “sleep-inducing”, so (a little less obviously) part of the meaning of “being able to read” is “phonological awareness: that is, the ability to pronounce—in effect, to read—words correctly. In the same way, some supposed mathematical faculty—“being good at manipulating numbers”, perhaps could not be used to explain ‘being good at arithmetic’, since the former is conceptually part of the latter.Quite a lot of supposed psychological explanation is of this kind. To use some other examples (for which see Wilson, 1972), “People who like each other tend to get on better” and “Students who are more motivated will, other things being equal, learn more” are, pretty obviously, logical or conceptual truths rather than empirical truths or matters of fact. But often the status of the assertion is unclear. Thus an empirical enquiry into whether popular people were warm, supportive and friendly might be thought unnecessary, on the grounds that there is a conceptual overlap between “popular” and “warm, supportive and friendly”. On the other hand, the researcher might mean by “popular” something like “supported or voted for by a lot of people”: in that sense, Hitler and Margaret Thatcher would count as popular, without any implication that they were warm or supportive or friendly; and then the enquiry could be genuinely empirical. Great care has to be taken to determine what various researchers actually do mean by the terms they use, since the status of their research depends on that.Thomas gives the impression that he is actually against the existence or at least the explanatory power of mental faculties. Even after careful reading, it is unclear whether he believes in mental faculties at all (in his summary he writes of “supposed faculties (such as memory or awareness)”). But nobody with a grasp of the English language could seriously doubt that terms like “intelligence”, “imagination”, “memory”, and others stood for (fairly general) mental powers, capabilities or abilities: one would have to believe that when we said things like “He’s very intelligent”, “She’s a rather unimaginative person”, “His memory is pretty poor”, and so on we were talking about mythical objects like unicorns or phlogiston.Further, we often use faculties to explain performance. Someone is bad at history: this may be because he lacks general intelligence, or because he has a very bad memory for dates and other historical facts, or it might be because he just hates the subject, so that the cause is not a faculty or ability at all but a kind of disposition or motivational state. The question will be open, but the presence or absence or adequacy of a faculty may answer it. But, of course, we must be able to identify the faculty independently of the performance: otherwise we fall into the virtus dormitiva trap, or find ourselves saying that failure to read must be due to “verbal interpretation incompetence” (where this means no more than “being unable to read”); or, to take a topical example, that if some person cannot or will not pay due attention he must be suffering from “Attention Deficit Syndrome” as if that phrase named some disease which caused the overt behaviour. Thomas is right to warn us of this danger; but that is no reason for dispensing with mental faculties altogether.Nor is it a reason for turning our backs on the physiological preconditions, or constituents, or correspondences with mental powers and performances. Again we are uncertain about how far Thomas really wants to do this; but he talks (p. 164) of “an assumption that an ability could be understood physiologically” (his italics), and says “The assumption is dualistic: that ‘abilities’ emerge out of ‘physiological processes’ in the brain”. Now we know very well that mental powers depend on brain-states: that if people suffer from brain damage some of their mental powers lapse: even that certain types of brain-states correlate with certain mental powers. In that sense they are dependent on, or ‘emerge out of’, certain physiological conditions.That, presumably, is not what Thomas wishes to deny. What perhaps he wishes to deny, quite rightly, is the possibility of a description of some mental ability being translated into purely physiological terms: as if the expression “intelligent” meant “such-and-such neurones moving in such-and-such ways”, or as if the chess-move “pawn to king four” could be translated into statements about the movement of a wooden object. In that sense he is right to claim that an ability cannot be “understood physiologically”. But that does not mean that abilities do not have a physiological background and physiological connections or preconditions or perhaps even fairly detailed correspondence. The sentence he is criticising (from Farnham-Diggory, 1992) begins, “Exactly what this ability involves physiologically is not fully understood”; and that is harmless enough, for whilst what we mean by “being able to read” cannot be translated into physiological terms, it certainly involves certain physiological states. And it is obviously important to discover what these states are.There is a general lesson here which it is important for both researchers and practitioners to learn, and which goes far beyond the particular points that I have mentioned above. What these points demonstrate is the absolute necessity of saying clearly what we mean when we use certain words both in theory and in practice. For if we do not do this, we cannot be clear about just what actual phenomena the words are supposed to describe—we cannot even identify the phenomena properly, let alone explain them.Thus both research in reading and special pedagogies designed to improve reading will be geared, consciously or unconsciously, to some conception of what reading is or what the ability to read consists of. But that is already a misleading way of putting it: “what reading is” or “what the ability to read consists of” might be taken as the titles of some empirical enquiry, an enquiry into the constituents of water and find that if was made up of H20. We have, rather, to determine first what “reading” or “able to read” mean; and that is a logical or linguistic rather than a factual or scientific enquiry. In the same way we need to know what we mean by “intelligence” before we can enquire into what intelligence is made up of: otherwise we should not know just what is was that we were enquiring into under the heading of “intelligence” rather than some other heading.There are in fact some (fairly obvious) questions to be asked about both these concepts. The meaning of “intelligent” does not include either the idea of factual knowledge or the idea of being motivated: if a person knows little or nothing about a subject, or the person is not disposed to be interested in it, that is no criticism of their intelligence. But is there any conceptual connection between intelligence and memory? Certainly we can say “It’s not that he’s unintelligent, it’s just that he has a bad memory”; but suppose we ask someone to solve a lengthy problem which involves quite a lot of information, and by the time they come to the end of the problem they have forgotten the information we gave them at the beginning. Is that lack of intelligence? (“A is bigger than B”. “OK, I’ve got that”. “B is bigger than C”. “Fine, B’s bigger than C, I understand”. “So what can you tell us about A and C?” “Sorry, I forgot what you said about a minute ago ...”). Or, again, is being able to solve problems quickly part of what we mean by “intelligent”? Are brilliant chess-moves more brilliant if they take only a short time to think up? Is it fair to time IQ tests?It may be that we are so used to employing these words, and engaging in various practices connected with what they stand for, that we think we already know well enough what we mean. But even the concept marked by “reading” is far from clear. Thus (1) “reading” presumably involves more than just making appropriate pronounciation: it involves some kind of understanding of what is read. But how much understanding, and understanding of what? Of grammar and syntax and sentence-structure only, or of semantics also? Or (2) what kind of content does “the ability to read” involve? What vocabulary is supposed to be used; what subject matter is the person supposed to be familiar with? Nursery rhymes, shopping lists, descriptions of everyday occurrences at school, fairy tales, the lyrics of pop music, or what? Whether a person is “able to read” or not will be largely relative to this content and vocabulary. One might even ask (3) what kind of script or symbols are we talking about? A person can read English (in capital letters or minuscules), Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics, mathematical equations, maps and charts, graphs, musical scores, and many other things: there is no reason to suppose that there is something called “the ability to read” which is totally independent of the symbolic medium.The point here is not that we need, as it were, to be a little more precise about the words we use; as if that were something we could easily do in our spare time, before undertaking the serious empirical enquiry. It is rather that without investigating the meaning of words we literally do not know what we are talking about, so that much of our psychological theory and educational practice is disconnected from the real world. In natural science the danger is less: we do indeed know pretty well what is meant by (for instance) “planet”, “movement”, and perhaps “atom”; we can identify these things because we know what the words mean, and go on to try to explain them. But anyone who thinks that we know, just as clearly and unequivocally, what is meant by “intelligence”, “memory”, “motivation”, “cognition”, “affect” and other terms with which psychology deals needs to think again.Working out what words mean should not be conceived as a kind of (perhaps rather tiresome) preliminary to research and practice, but as part of them. Yet is seems that few empirical researchers even understand the task. For instance, in the same issue of the journal in which Thomas’ article appears there was an interesting paper on “Circle Time” (Lown, 2002), with a section entitled “Definitions of circle time”. Here we are told (p. 94) that White (1989) shares the view with other authors (Lang & Moslay 1993; Margerison 1996) that circle time is in the main a tool for improving self-esteem, but adds that in so doing it also improves learning. White (1989) also sees circle time as a method of cultivating group identity and cohesion. Housego and Burns (1994) agree with the idea that circle time can and should enhance learning ... Another frequently stated view in the literature is that circle time is a method of improving circle skills ...And so on.Now it is abundantly clear that whatever this is, it is not an attempt to say what the phrase “circle time” means. It does not even try to do that. Typically, writers ‘collect definitions’ from other people, without themselves saying what a term means or how it is used: and, worse, what they collect are not really definitions at all, but (as here) a series of remarks connected with some phenomenon (‘circle time’) which are already supposed to be identifiable. Normally we define words, not things: “Define that word ‘dog’” makes sense, but not “Define this dog”.The above points have been belaboured because it is fatally easy to see the task of defining terms—of laying out what is conceptually involved by for example, “intelligence”, or “reading” or “self-esteem” or any other term, and what is not conceptually involved—as in some pejorative sense “academic” (too “abstract”, “philosophical”, or even “nit-picking”). But it is surely obvious, even without the benefit of lengthy argument, that (for instance) what we count as “a disability” or “a learning difficulty”, what we mean by “dyslexic” or “autism”, what we take to be part or not part of the logic of the expression “gifted and talented”, “disruptive”, “hyperactive” and so on will inevitably give a certain direction to our research and hence to our practice. What we do is driven by how we think, and how we think is largely determined by the concepts we use. The author hopes that these remarks, brief and sketchy though they are, will at least show the importance of this enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new practical visual approach, the Rules Grid, to support children who have social communication and interaction needs. The Rules Grid involves a system whereby behaviours of concern can be broken down into smaller behavioural manifestations which in turn lead not only to problem identification and specification, but provide a visible structure to support behaviour change at a reasonably micro level. The paper provides an overview of the theory and research that support visual approaches before outlining some important examples of visual strategies. This is followed by a presentation of a single case study which illustrates how the Rules Grid could be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]