ABA doesn't know how to do flashcards

One of the most stressful experiences for future medical doctors is the process of studying for Step 1, the exam where they have to be able to recall every piece of medical knowledge they have acquired over two years of classes, and how well they do determines their entire career, what specialties they are able to go into, and how good of a residency they can get. Naturally, when you have a lot of smart people with a lot of resources under absurd pressure to have to memorize an incredible amount of material, a winner will emerge as a method for how to study. That method is Anki and spaced repetition. The field of applied behavior analysis, which posits itself "the science of learning," is not even familiar with spaced repetition.   

​

The only method to be found in ABA textbooks, and the only method that is known to any BCBA I have worked with or taken classes from, is a method called SAFMEDS (Say All Fast, a Minute Every Day, Shuffled). With SAFMEDS, you take 10-15 words or terms and review them for 1 minute a day, trying to get through them as fast as possible. You do this for a week to try to get your timing to under 1 minute, and, if after a week you're able to go through all of them in under a minute, you switch to another 10-15 words. Now, if you told a medical student to do this prepare for Step 1, they wouldn't even laugh in your face because they wouldn't respect you enough for that. 

​

The reason this method is so laughably bad is obvious: you simply cannot memorize all the information that you need to by learning 10 words a week. Yet, this is the method ABA uses when teaching students. Autistic people fail to learn because ABA only knows how to do methods that work enough for a paper but not enough to actually teach. 

​

Consider the term, "evidence-based," which ABA likes to use to justify itself. Something is "evidence-based" if it works better than a control or better than nothing. We could for example, call it "evidence-based" if you showed that working a $15/hour job for 10 hours a week will result in a higher monthly paycheck than working an $8/hour job for 10 hours a week. There would be "evidence" that your paycheck is higher. Can you afford rent? No, but the end result doesn't matter to people who only care about something being "evidence-based." This is how ABA does science, and given that most RBTs have no guaranteed hours, this is actually probably how they justify that. In chemistry, though, if you wrote papers that were simply "evidence-based" instead of "figure out how to synthesize this molecule or you can't publish" papers, you would not make it very far. In chemistry we are expected to actually figure out how to produce reasonable results. 
 

In 2018 I began the process of teaching myself Dutch, which I eventually became fluent in. I started however, with Duolingo. Duolingo functions similarly to SAFMEDS in that it convinces you that you are doing enough by doing a couple of exercises a day. Everyone, however, knows someone with a 1000+ streak on Duolingo who cannot speak the language, and that is the result of SAFMEDS-like methods, not because the person is incapable. Duolingo and SAFMEDS are both good enough to publish papers showing they sort of works, but they don't work enough to bring someone to a reasonable level. If ever you are wondering why some autistic people seem to struggle to do things, remember they were taught with a method that is less effective than Duolingo, since Duolingo at least asks you to do 15 minutes per day instead of just the 1 minute that SAFMEDS has you do. When I stopped using Duolingo and started doing listening input, extensive and intensive reading, conversation groups, and Anki was when my ability to speak Dutch actually increased and I became fluent. 

​

The language learning community is the other main user of Anki, since a language comprises vast amounts of knowledge. By utilizing the idea of the forgetting curve, you schedule your flashcards so that you see the words right when you are expected to forget them, increasing your recall "muscle" for the word. Each time you strengthen your ability to recall the word, you can go longer before you need to see it again. So you might have intervals of 1, 4, 7, 12, then 20 days, for example, as shown on the right. There are programs that can calculate these intervals for you, which is what Anki does. Through this method, you are able to add more words to your vocabulary than with SAFMEDS, since you are not seeing every word each day, and can add 10-15 new words per day, instead of per week. Since it is having you learn through practicing recall, it is also more effective than doing it through rote memorization, and since it lets you move on without knowing every word in a set, you don't get stuck on the same 10-15 words until you get it perfect. The language learning community heavily emphasizes time spent on listening input and reading as the key for language learning, and Anki, learning grammar, and conversations are there to supplement these.

​

Anki and spaced repetition are by far not the only ingredients for learning a language or skill, but it is important to know that ABA, which calls itself the "science of learning," and which is somehow allowed to bill insurance as an autism treatment, doesn't even know how to learn through flashcards. This is important because a lot of ABA, including the new ABA, is based solely on collecting data and doing flashcard trials, with breaks for "play" where the child is usually left to do their own thing while the person working with them chats with their coworkers or uses their phone, occasionally glancing up to yell at the child for "eloping." No matter what, they always seem to let autistic people take the fall for struggling to learn, and it is no wonder most autistic people would prefer to be left alone. Even if an autistic person wants to learn, after enough time being forced to listen to insecure, reactive "medical providers" who use these ineffective, doltish methods, I think I'd rather just not bother either. 

​

​