Tool Tuesday: THINKING about our Summer Study Series!

It has been a longstanding shift on the MindWing Blog to transition through summer with a series of posts geared around processing literature in our field. Naturally, we want to gear these towards the months when you might have a little more TIME to devote to reading the articles. We also angle them towards practical strategies related to improving narrative and expository language, or the microstructure, within Story Grammar Marker^®.

I find it an elegant icon, serving to scaffold both complex language (I remembered that “it was the last week of school” contains an embedded clause) and perspective taking, a skill endorsed by advocates of neurodiversity affirming approaches.

For this month’s post, I traced a source through Anna Vagin’s work, as she has also provided many resources on working with mental state verbs (MSVs). Good news: it’s short! The article is more of an academic study project, but an important reference in underscoring the evidence base of working with these linguistic and story elements. You can find it here: Improving The Use Of Mental State Verbs By Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders In Two Narrative Production Tasks: Story Retelling And Spontaneous Story Generation.

To summarize the study, the researchers evaluated the efficacy of the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) narrative intervention program to increase the use of mental state and causal language in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). SKILL is similar to SGM in drawing from the same research base and providing an icon-based approach to teaching and internalizing the essential story elements, so the results can easily be extrapolated to working with SGM. Researchers tracked five children (ages 8–12) over a series of twice-weekly individual sessions targeting two tasks: story retelling and spontaneous story generation based on picture prompts. Their results demonstrated substantial, clinically significant increases in student production of both modeled and unmodeled mental state verbs (e.g., decided, thought, realized). These linguistic gains were maintained after the interventions, suggesting that explicitly teaching these microstructure elements within a macrostructure approach improved the use of MSVs, opening the door to more effective perspective taking.

From a practical standpoint, the study supports these strategies:

• Explicitly Teach a Mental State Vocabulary: Systematically introduce and model "cognitive process" verbs to explicitly link character actions to their internal motivations. I find it helpful to construct “student friendly definitions” and talk with students abstractly about what the differences are between different MSVs, e.g. “to decide is to make a choice in your mind.” AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini can help you generate lists of mental state verbs, student-friendly definitions, and even visual supports to help you contextualize these abstract words.

• Target Internal Responses and Plans (Theory of Mind Scaffolding): Focus intervention lessons specifically on the macrostructure elements of internal responses and plans. Explicitly teaching these elements directly targets inferring the emotional or mental states of others, and fits directly with Mindwing’s icons.
• Utilize Dual Narrative Production Contexts: Incorporate both story retelling and spontaneous, single-scene story generation tasks into interventions. While retells build stability of story structure and recall, spontaneous generation tasks from visual prompts can elicit a higher frequency of mental state verbs and foster independent narrative formulation. I would add that a simple, “Has anything like this happened to you?” provides an opportunity for the differing but essential genre of the personal narrative.

As a final note, I’d like to share how the above suggestions have played out for a teen client of mine. He has benefited from the use of SGM greatly in expanding his narrative, and we are at a place where we can be targeting some of the MSV-heavy situations in contexts that are of interest to him, particularly the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Being that Hobbes is essentially imaginary, the strips are always about what one character is thinking vs. the other(s). The student benefits from having the SGM icons present to reinforce and expand his narration, and in each activity we also work from a bank of MSVs to construct sentences relevant to the story, or from his own perspective. Here’s an example: [insert image MSV2]

Have a great summer!