While I'm a little put off by some of the flip comments in this article, the content is very important and I hope a change is coming in this direction SOON...

 

(...and am I right in my thought that one of these doctors has autism?  Cool...)

 

******

 

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20226463/site/newsweek/

The Puzzle of Hidden Ability

By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - Even their parents struggle to draw the tiniest hint
of emotion or social connection from autistic children, so imagine what
happens when a stranger sits with the child for hours to get through the standard
IQ test. For 10 of the test's 12 sections, the child must listen and respond
to spoken questions. Since for many autistics it is torture to try to engage
with someone even on this impersonal level, it's no wonder so many wind up with
IQ scores just above a carrot's (I wish I were exaggerating; 20s are not
unknown). More precisely, fully three quarters of autistics are classified as having
below-normal intelligence, with many deemed mentally retarded.

It's finally dawning on scientists that there's a problem here. Testing
autistic kids' intelligence in a way that requires them to engage with a stranger
"is like giving a blind person an intelligence test that requires him to
process visual information," says Michelle Dawson of Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital
in Montreal. She and colleagues therefore tried a different IQ test, one that
requires no social interaction. As they report in the journal Psychological
Science, autistic children's scores came out starkly different than on the oral,
interactive IQ test-suggesting a burning intelligence inside these kids that
educators are failing to uncover.

That failure has lifelong implications. "If we label these children as
below-normal in intelligence, that is how they're treated," says Laurent
Mottron, who led the study. The disparity between scores on the two IQ tests also makes
you wonder who else the tests, which are used for everything from screening
military recruits to filling "gifted" classes, are mislabeling.

For the study, children took two IQ tests. In the more widely used Wechsler,
they tried to arrange and complete pictures, do simple arithmetic, demonstrate
vocabulary comprehension and answer questions such as what to do if you find
a wallet on the street-almost all in response to a stranger's questions. In
the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, they got brief instructions, then went
off on their own to analyze three-by-three arrays of geometric designs, with one
missing, and choose (from six or eight possibilities) the design that
belonged in the empty place. The disparity in scores was striking. One autistic
child's Wechsler result meant he was mentally retarded (an IQ below 70); his
Raven's put him in the 94th percentile. Overall, the autistics (all had full-blown
autism, not Asperger's) scored around the 30th percentile on the Wechsler,
which corresponds to "low average" IQ. But they averaged in the 56th percentile
on the Raven's. Not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence"
range on the Wechsler; on the Raven's, one third did. Healthy children showed
no such disparity.

The Wechsler measures "crystallized intelligence"-what you've learned.
The Raven's measures "fluid intelligence"-the ability to learn, process
information, ignore distractions, solve problems and reason-and so is arguably a truer
measure of intelligence, says psychologist Steven Stemler of Wesleyan University.

That presents a puzzle. If many autistics are more intelligent than an IQ
test shows, why haven't their parents noticed? Partly because many parents
welcome a low score, which brings their child more special services from schools
and public agencies, says one scientist who has an autistic son (and who fears
that being named would antagonize the close-knit autism community). But another
force is at work. "We often think of intelligence as what you can show, such
as by speaking fluently," says psychologist Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the
University of Wisconsin. "Parents as well as professionals might be biased
to look at that" rather than dig for the hidden intellectual spark.

The challenge is to coax that spark into the kind of intelligence that
manifests itself in practice. That is something autism researchers are far from
doing. Worse, much of the expert advice might be counterproductive. Many experts
dismiss autistics' exceptional reading, artistic or other abilities as side
effects of abnormal brain function, "not a reflection of genuine human
intelligence, which it is likely to be," says Mottron. They advise parents
to steer their child away from what he excels at and obsesses over, such as letters and
words and details, and toward what he struggles with, such as faces and the big
picture. Dawson, who is autistic, thinks that's a prescription for intellectual
failure; autistics should be encouraged to build on their strengths, as
everyone else is. The problem of a lurking intelligence that won't be coaxed
out by the usual education and parenting methods is not necessarily unique to
autistics. It makes you wonder how many other children, whose intellectual potential
we're too blind to see, we've also given up on.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.