BW: Why does testing remain such a controversial issue? That is, the assumptions of the standard approach of the educational community compared to your methodology?
RF: The conventional psychometric [mental measurement] approach has a big industry behind it. To change that industry is to challenge that whole paradigm. The standard approach to testing makes several assumptions, which are quite negative. The main assumption is that cognitive and intellectual factors are stable, static functions — that you can measure them the way you can measure a table. But if cognitive and intellectual functions are really variable and changeable functions, then applying a static measure is to deny the essential characteristics of it.
We reframe the concept of diagnosis. We move it from static to dynamic. To diagnose somebody with Down syndrome is only one part of the issue. What are you doing? You’re diagnosing their genetic characteristics. But if you diagnose the person with Down syndrome as unable to learn, as being essentially retarded, your diagnosis has been misplaced. We are reframing diagnosis into assessment — and that assessment is dynamic, not static.
Today the most important criteria for success is not what you know but what you can learn. And many of the static diagnoses preclude that possibility: “You are this, therefore you can’t do that. You are that, therefore you can’t do this.” The theory of SCM turns that around.
BW: Standardized testing and diagnosis isn’t geared toward success and change in an individual?
RF: If I administer a psychometric test to somebody, at the end of that psychometric test, I will have some scores, which will make some predictions, but the learner is not changed by it — indeed, the person assessed walks away with a feeling of failure because they know what they couldn’t do. In LAPD, the learner is affected by the experience, so if you identify the deficient function and you apply MLE educational methods in the classroom, the function starts to change — and you have two outcomes: One outcome is you’re able to say, “These are the changes possible”; but the second result is the person is affected by those changes. If LAPD is done well, it leads to the person being positively changed by the result of being assessed. That’s a very big change.
BW: How does research today about neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain and nervous system in all species to change structurally and functionally as a result of input from the environment—relate to your work?
RF: My work continued to affect very substantial changes in the cognitive and social behavior of very low-functioning people and very deprived people — culturally and environmentally and genetically. Slowly, genetic and neurophysiological research has confirmed the potential for cognitive modifiability, changes in neural structures and that these neural structures then lead to a circular kind of effect — you change the brain, the brain responds differently. It’s an exciting time. The knowledge of the brain is in approximately the same place analogously to Columbus or Magellan sailing off to show the world that it’s not flat. It’s that kind of radical awareness of phenomena that we are experiencing.
BW: What do some of these new findings mean for understanding how we learn and think?
RF: That the spirit shapes the brain no less than the brain produces spirit. Some of the Italian group — Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues — are beginning to localize in the neurophysiological system those neural functions that relate to spiritual, moral, and ethical thinking, which then get cortically acted on. The brain is being meaningfully affected by the activities that the individual is asked to do — to really produce certain things. By doing this, we impose on the brain certain types of activities which make proliferate neurons that then have synaptic interactions in our organization of the brain. And this has been shown now, with real-time changes in the brain. The meaning of this is not just theoretical, and not just a thesis to put into the drawer; it is a daily, used, applied, and modifying of individuals.
BW: Is this is your secret, the belief in the spirit of the individual, regardless of disability and potentially limited functioning from a classic viewpoint?
RF: My need was to see the other grow, to see the other change beyond what he was expected to be. My need created in me a belief — that there is nothing which will keep this individual at the same level, that he will be able to benefit by the kind of opportunities that will be given to him, if they are given to him; and these beliefs, which were a product of a need, made me then look for ways to prove it and develop a technology. Belief in your fellow man makes you not accept that this individual is lost, that he will never change, that you shouldn’t invest in him, that he will never benefit from your investment.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Fall 2011 issue.
More From Brain World
- The Blending Brain: Cognitive Scientist Mark Turner on the Origin of Ideas
- Clarifying Creative Cognition
- Getting Into The Flow: A Q&A with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Neuroplasticity In Action
- Reading Minds: An Interview with Dr. Adrian Owen
- You Are Your Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
