EdFix Episode 3: The Power and Potential of Positive Psychology for Students with Disabilities
TRANSCRIPT
BETH TUCKWILLER:
You can't of think of mental health is just the absence of psychopathology. It's not just having low anxiety or low depression. It's also about the presence of positive mental health.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm Michael Feuer and this is EdFix, a source of insights about the practice and promise of education. Today, we are very fortunate to have a pair of guests with me, Dr. Beth Tuckwiller, and Dr. Will Dardick, members of the faculty here at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Beth comes to her work in psychology and special education with experience in mental health counseling, working on the preparation of teachers who work with students who may have emotional, behavioral, and other learning needs.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Will Dardick comes here with many years of experience as an expert in measurement and statistics and has worked in the government in various research organizations. And his work, his research mainly has focused on the development of something that we all love dearly, educational tests and psychological instruments. Welcome.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Thank you.
WILL DARDICK:
Thank you.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, let me start, Beth, with you. When I think of you and your work, the two words that come to mind immediately are positive psychology.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Fair enough.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And so tell us what positive psychology is about.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Positive psychology is, well, in some ways it's new. The empirical study of it is fairly new. Some of the ideas, though, are embedded in ancient Greek philosophy and the work of Aristotle, this idea of happiness and wellbeing, even hedonism. Let me just talk about it from kind of this newer empirical perspective. The idea of positive psychology is really about understanding positive experiences, positive individual traits, and positive institutions, and the idea is that it's important to understand wellbeing, and what predicts flourishing, and what predicts optimal functioning in an educational setting. While we're teaching students traditional academic curricula, we could also be teaching them how to develop positive traits and to cultivate positive experiences. So, things like optimism, growth mindset, perseverance, persistence, resilience, hope. We can actually learn how to do these things to increase positive outcomes for ourselves and to promote what we think of as flourishing, which means not just the absence of mental illness, but the presence of positive mental health.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
To the extent that this is now becoming a field or almost a sub-specialty in the preparation of educators suggests to me that what might have once been assumed to be a kind of natural disposition has become more challenging. Is it because things have changed fundamentally in the environment so that we're now more worried about kids' resilience and capacity to keep a smile on their face? Or is it because the science has now just gone in another direction and we're opening up the world of scholarship to think about these issues differently?
BETH TUCKWILLER:
And again, I think it's a little bit of both. We're getting better at understanding how we might think about measuring things like positive developments or these positive traits. But there's also evidence that there are a lot of challenges that kids today are facing in terms of mental health: behavioral difficulties, developmental challenges. When you take a look at CDC statistics on risk and mental illness in youth, it's sobering to see that between one and six to one and eight youth and adolescents really struggle in these domains. So, the ... an important part of this picture is the idea that ... and this, again, is a rather new idea, this idea of the dual factor model of mental health. You can't think of mental health as just the absence of psychopathology. It's not just having low anxiety or low depression. It's also about the presence of positive mental health and subjective wellbeing.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
So, when we think about kids and their development and where they are in terms of of mental illness, we're worried about how do we augment any treatment they might be receiving for that with positive developmental activities, exercises, intentional programs? So, I think that, yes, the science is burgeoning and we're seeing more interest in the field, but we're also realizing that kids who are struggling ... for instance, if they have a mental health episode, an episode of depression, students who have high wellbeing, positive mental health, will have fewer negative outcomes from that depressive episode than most students who have low wellbeing and also experience a negative episode. They will have better outcomes if they have high wellbeing. So, it's a mediating factor as well.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, how are we doing at taking some of these concepts, which intuitively, I think everybody would say, "Yes, we need to know more about them," and turning it into operational measures that we can then know does a particular program increase or decrease the likelihood that young people will have the kind of disposition that will be helpful to them? Tell us how measurement fits into this.
WILL DARDICK:
Maybe I'll first start off with the idea of what we're doing with psychometrics and also what's done a little bit with kind of a counterpart that's more of an IO psych piece.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
IO meaning?
WILL DARDICK:
Industrial organizational psychology. So, in psychometrics we are trying to measure, often, things that we can't see in education and psychology. And as a psychometrician, or someone in assessment and measurement, we are using tools and trying to understand what those underlying things are. So, for example, in positive psychology we may have this idea of optimism, but what is optimism? How do I touch optimism? What are the things about optimism that I believe that it exists at least as a construct? So, this is not unique to the field of education and psychology. We see these things when someone tries to detect a black hole and that's more of a tangible thing. Someone can comprehend that there are things out there, which we only rely on the belief of them based on the indicators that we get. So, what we do in education, we construct these things we call tests. And in psychology we build things we call assessments. And the mathematics are the same type of thing underlying them. But sometimes the direction is a little bit different.
WILL DARDICK:
So, understanding why we might even want to do this is helpful as well. We all have an intuitive idea of what a test is. I give you and Beth here a simple 10 point test and you get the nine questions right, and Beth gets nine questions right. Same nine questions, same identical test. And I say, Michael, you did very well, and I'm going to give you 50% and Beth, you did okay, you get 100%, and the two of you look at me and say, "Well that's ... First, that's not fair." Well, maybe Beth would be like, "Well, of course. That sounds fair to me." But first, this intuition about fairness, and then this intuition about how did you come to the conclusion that you drew? And how is this any sort of consistency going on here? So, even our intuitions about testing lead us to these ideas of psychometrics that we want rules to our tests or our psychological instruments, that we want fairness when applying those rules. We want them to be consistent, and we want to be able to measure objects or people.
WILL DARDICK:
So, in applying the ideas of measurement to psychology, we want to also be able to uncover the positive psychological constructs. Like, "What is optimism and how do we know what exists?" So, we build scales, we build indicators. We can observe this in the world. And that's what we would do in the psychometric end. When the industrial organizational psych end, and I sort of just, in my own head, split it out in this direction, because this becomes the qualitative work. And I also have a lot of experience on this end where I do a domain, or job analysis, or analysis of the field, and I have to get in there and deconstruct what it is that we're talking about. What are the tasks? What are the knowledge? What are the skills that are associated, for example, with optimism? Or in education with mathematics in eighth grade, for example. So, both kinds of skillsets, the qualitative end of building a domain or building a psychological area or educational area from kind of the ground up that we believe in the arguments of validity. Then from the psychometric end sort of confirming that there is some measurement that we can justify.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, say another sentence about where we are in in this particular area with respect to positive psychology. What's the main motivating factor behind the development of these metrics? Is it in order to label people and use that as a way of qualifying them for some kinds of advancement? Or is this more of a way to provide teachers, parents, and the kids themselves with information that they wouldn't otherwise have had and then hope for the best?
WILL DARDICK:
I think there's a couple things to re-unpack there. So-
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Re-pack. It's good.
WILL DARDICK:
Yeah, right. So, the first thing I'll isolate is that the example I gave was an example of unfair treatment to start with. So, I will reverse that and say what we desire is that you two have the same set of items, we would desire ... or the same profile in optimism, for example, in psychology, we would develop instruments which would yield similar or the same results. So, that's the first goal is to be both fair, reliable, and valid. So, that means that your two scores would not be dissimilar. That's the trivial answer to the first part of that question.
WILL DARDICK:
The second thing I would say about consequences is a separate issue in this point. If the test is fair, if a test is reliable, if the test is valid, there's still the consequences, both intended and unintended, of that psychological instrument. So, in dealing with psychological variables, in dealing with psychological concepts, such as those that we have in positive psychology, there are consequences at several levels. Just like with a test to determine whether or not you get into school. If the values are known, if the results are known, it could have consequences for the individual.
WILL DARDICK:
So, in considering consequential validity, is what I would say, we would think that the first in psychological evaluations you have to understand how they're going to be used, and how they may be used. So, when thinking how we are going to use them, we may be using them as an end result into the future, we have not done so ourselves with this yet potentially, develop treatments, right? So, if we find that an increase in optimism is related to the self-perception or perception of your own intelligence, and that is then an increase in performance in schools, for example, on academic variables. Then we might see that that is an opportunity to try and create an intervention for positive psychological variables such as ... or factors such as optimism.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
How close are we to feeling like we could actually experiment with making some of those changes as a result of this sort of measured approach?
BETH TUCKWILLER:
So, I think there's two big ideas here to dig into a little bit. One is that Will and I are trying to unpack something that is subjective to an individual, and we're trying to understand it from a subjective lens. So, when I ask a child, "What is your degree of wellbeing?" It doesn't matter what I think their wellbeing is, and it doesn't matter what their parents think their wellbeing is. The teacher report is less important in the individual trait level than what the child says, the child's subjective evaluation of their wellbeing, because that is what frames their cognitions, which then interacts with their behaviors, and that's that individual level where we're thinking about where can we dig into that? And that's ... it's hard to think about that subjective level and measure it.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
But we need to figure it out, and we need to do it well because decisions already are being made based on some of the measures that are out there. For instance, this idea of growth mindset popularized by Carol Dweck and colleagues, and it's a really big idea in education right now. The idea that students can either believe that with effort, hard work, and practice, they can get better academically at something, gets smarter often is the the lingo that's used, or a fixed mindset belief where they think, "I'm either born good at math or I'm not." So, this idea is out there. It's being used and applied in many, many schools. The mindset scale and eight items scale is often used to show that there are increases in growth mindset after intervention, or that a child has fixed mindset. And then that decides if interventions work, that decides if schools buy programs, that decides how much of a school day is spent on developing mindset.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
So, these instruments are already being put to use in terms of making some decisions like that. And one of the things that was really exciting when Will and I started working together, Will brought this lens of intense measurement and kind of questioning of, "Well, what does mindset mean? What are we actually capturing with these eight items and how do they function? And how does the measure function?" It really made us stop and sit back and say, "What is it that we actually think we're measuring here? And what factors are we picking up in these tools that measure optimism, that measure mindset, that measure grit?" There are ... in self efficacy, and hope.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You said grit.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Yes, grit, Angela Duckworth's work, and locus of control, and self efficacy, and hope, and resilience. There's a hundred different factors out there. Part of our work has focused on trying to understand are there higher order factors that organize some of those constructs? And right now we're working on a piece where we have uncovered some really compelling evidence using some modeling that suggests that optimism is what drives the growth mindset. And a lot of programming is focused on intervening on mindset. So, our question, when we look at our data, is, "Well, what would happen if we actually focused those interventions on optimism? Would the effects last longer? Would they be a more generalizable?" So, the measurement piece of this ends up opening up a whole box of potential other big questions.
WILL DARDICK:
In our discussions, when you discuss consequences, it's also the unforeseen consequences. So, in psychology, there's phenomenon that arise. When we label someone something, they endorse that and they tend to become that more. So, there could be a positive aspect to this, but for all of our positive psychological variables, you mentioned growth and fixed mindset. So, if someone is labeled as a growth or fixed mindset, could that influence them more into either one of those categories? So, even in doing this work, we are cautious. There's the positive and in more the colloquial way that we want to improve outcomes, but there's also consequences that we are aware of both that seem direct, but also we take a step back and consider those things that might be indirect consequences of using any psychological phenomenon.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
How'd you guys get into this line of work? Beth, you were, I think you were teaching before you came back into the world of research. So, give us a sense of the pathway here.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Well, I'll give you the short version, because there's a long version too. My first career was mental health counseling. I was trained traditionally to think about psychopathology and how to treat it. So, very much a medical model of what's gone wrong and how do we fix it? That's a ... it's a tough perspective when that's the lens all the time. When I went into teaching, into special education, I was working students with significant emotional, behavioral, and learning challenges and it was a lot of the same model. It just translated to that classroom setting of what's not working well for this student and how do we fix it? It was very much a deficit focused framework.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
And around 2000 Martin Seligman up at Penn took ... was guest editing a journal and in that issue he talked a lot about positive psychology as a new lens from which to think about things, not just how to make things ... how to fix illness, but how to also promote happiness. And later on that turned kind of into a focus on wellbeing.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
So, coming to GW as a disability study ... special education and disability studies faculty member, it was important to me to think about how we augment important work that happens in special education, how to remediate challenges and foundational math skills. How do we interact with students in ways that help them overcome challenges that they have because of reading disability? That's important work. But as important is the work in trying to understand how do we build positive skills and cognitions? How do we help students see themselves in terms of their strengths? And how do we actively cultivates strengths for students, especially those students who have been labeled with a disability and often have, because of that label, already internalized a version of themselves as less than?
BETH TUCKWILLER:
So, I came to the work both from a philosophical perspective of wanting to think about children holistically and help children and youth think about their own profile of strengths and abilities, their power to do well for themselves and to do good in the world, and also scientifically because it needed work scientifically. It was just becoming an area of interest and we needed to understand the data. So, a lot of the work that we've done so far is very exploratory because the words positive and disability are rarely thought of in the same sentence.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, Will, how'd you land here?
WILL DARDICK:
I wanted to understand people from both the mind and brain perspective. And in doing so, I ended up actually first going into experimental psychology. And I got a Master's degree in Experimental Psychology. And investigating that world, I had no idea what a psychometrician was, but I started doing all the work from a psychological perspective of a psychometrician, still interest in learning and help how persons learned. So, I learned a lot of tools. I learned complex statistical modeling. I learned these ideas of reliability and validity, still having no clue what a psychometrician was until I ended up taking a job at University of Maryland and finding myself in a program there, which is assessment and testing measurement. There was an EDMS program in Maryland, the educational measurement statistics department. So, I had an opportunity to really learn what these types of educational measurement and psychological measurement tools are, and the philosophy behind them, and the psychology, and especially the area of cognitive psychology was still interesting to me as it related to learning and the way the brains function because we could model these things.
WILL DARDICK:
So, I ended up working for a while in the field, became a psychometrician. I worked in private industry. I worked for the government, helping, I still believe, helping them improve their methodology of testing and improve the way that they come around to the development of tests and also the psychometric modeling of testing. And I had an opportunity to transition from the applied world to the academic world and I took that opportunity here.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
We think about the Graduate School of Education, how much of it is so called basic research and how much is it sort of practical research? And for me the answer is it's use oriented foundational research that I think you are both examples of.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
I think we both were driven to do work that mattered, that would influence or have an impact on local lives. And we have a great appreciation for basic research. But in my own work it's applied for me all the way. So, the work that we've done has been coordinated through research partnerships that we've cultivated with local schools. That takes a lot of relationship building and development, and we've been so fortunate to work with some really incredible local people here who are also committed to work that matters to help improve outcomes for students. And the work was always geared toward a longterm agenda, so some initial exploratory work to understand different profiles for of these variables for students. And that works now in forming intervention development that's going to be implemented in the schools. We'll be doing work, eventually, on scaling and all the while also acknowledging the local contacts of each school and how important that is. So, the work also situated kind of in a design based iterative framework. So, we have this space to do work that helps local schools, but then also has a component that's generalizable, hopefully, to other similar places.
WILL DARDICK:
I have a philosophical belief that the more positive things you can put in your life, the less negative things that creep in there. So, this already, just my orientation toward these beliefs, I won't speak for Beth, but I will, right? Yeah. She also has this type of belief. So, I do a lot of basic, what you call basic research. Matter of fact, I do a lot of basic empirical theoretical research on brand new statistical models and things like entropy that when I say those things, people's eyes sometimes gloss over, unless you're interested in the field and then we get...
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yes, unfortunately this is radio, and we can't see my eyes glazing over, but we get the idea.
WILL DARDICK:
But this is a passion ... that is also a passionate area of mine. However, I want to have real, meaningful context of my research as well, and the opportunity to sort of mix in the very premise of my belief system in the ideas of positive, the relationship, the positive psychology, and helping to have the possibility of helping change in an area where I think students aren't always given that opportunity really made this a a good partnership for me.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The joke I usually say is that the difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist just has more data. And I now have to modify that and say I have some fresh data from the two of you that actually makes me much more optimistic about what we're all trying to do here.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Thank you for that.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And I wish you both a continued the success with this. I'm going to wrap this up by thanking Beth Tuckwiller and Will Dardick for joining me today. If those of you listening to our conversation found it as stimulating as you should have, I would encourage you to download it and be sure to review us on iTunes. You can find us there on EdFix. We're also on Spotify, iHeartRadio, Sound Cloud. You may visit our website, go.gwu.edu/edfix. Thank you both very much. Look forward to our next edition.
BETH TUCKWILLER:
Thank you, Michael.
WILL DARDICK:
Yeah, thank you.
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