Three cornerstones sit under everything I build. Self-determination is deciding your own day, and it is the first section below. Accountability — what two people owe each other once they are both on the record — runs through sections two, three and five. Self-awareness — a person building a picture of themselves they can act on — is what sections four and six are for. The research each one rests on is referenced at the bottom.
1. Self-determination is a mechanism, not a nice idea
Acting as the causal agent in your own life predicts what happens after a program ends — employment, independent living, the things the program existed for. Young people with intellectual disability score measurably lower on it than peers with other disabilities, so the gap is documented rather than assumed. And it moves: interventions have been shown to raise it.
That changes what autonomy is. It is not a kindness added at the edges of a service. It is the mechanism the outcomes run through — which means a system that quietly removes small decisions from a person is not being careful, it is working against the thing it exists to produce. So in what I build, the student clocks themselves in, holds their own schedule, writes their own goal, and says when it is done.
2. The breakdown sits between people, not inside one of them
The older account located autism as a deficit inside the person — a broken ability to model other minds. Damian Milton, an autistic researcher, relocated it: a mutual mismatch between people disposed differently to the world, running both ways. It gained ground partly because theory-of-mind accounts began failing replication, and partly because autistic people demonstrably communicate well with each other.
This is a live argument, not settled science. A 2026 paper by Kilgallon, Botha and Dwyer sets out what the double empathy problem is and, just as usefully, what it is not — including that some studies claiming to test it are not measuring what they say they are. I find the frame convincing, and it is contested. Both are true at once.
3. Witnessing, not grading
To grade someone is to claim you saw enough to judge. Nobody working with people quite does — a few hours a week, in one setting, while the rest of a life happens somewhere you are not. So I would rather witness, which makes a smaller claim and actually keeps it: I was here. This is what I saw. I know it is not everything.
One person was there for all of it. That is why the person living the day is the one who describes it — not only because it is theirs by right, though it is, but because they are the only one holding the whole of it.
4. The record is a compression, and it loses the part that mattered
Mehrabian’s 1967 studies asked a narrow question: when someone’s words and their delivery disagree, which does a listener believe? The answer was tone and face. That is not the popular “93% of communication is nonverbal” claim, which misreads the work badly, and I will not lean on a number that does not say what people think it says. The narrow finding is enough on its own: feeling travels in the channels we cannot manage.
Which means documentation is a lossy channel, and it loses exactly the part that carried the meaning. Everything that made the moment legible — the pause, the shift in posture, the way someone said it — is stripped on the way into the file, and the words that remain are the part that carried the least. Weeks later a decision gets made from what survived, by someone who was never in the room.
The answer is not longer notes. It is to stop pretending the record replaces being there, and to let it do the one thing it is genuinely good at: making sure the next person arrives already knowing, so the time in the room gets spent on the person instead of on catching up.
5. What goes unsaid still arrives
This one is not from a journal, it is from the work. What a system declines to record, and the reply a person never gets, do not stay empty. Someone fills them in — usually from the worst reading available, because that is what anyone does when they are reasoning confidently from a fraction of the record.
Which makes the repair structural rather than moral. You do not talk someone out of a bad read of a person; you supply the context they were missing. That is the same move in a conversation, in a program, and in a support system — and it is why a reply landing underneath what someone wrote is load-bearing rather than courteous.
6. A daily habit, not a study that ends
Technology-based self-monitoring produces a large positive effect on on-task behaviour for students with disabilities, and having the device in the student’s own hand is credited as part of why. The same literature finds those gains typically fail to maintain once a time-limited intervention stops. That is the argument for building the habit into the ordinary day rather than running it as a project with an end date.
Why I build this rather than write it down and hand it over
Software can finally bend to the human instead of the human bending to the software. That is genuinely new, and the reason most programs have not acted on it is not incapacity — nobody has shown them another way is possible. Imagining it is the entry fee; the effort is what separates it from a wish. So the argument above exists as something that runs a real program every day, and as free printable worksheets anyone can use tomorrow, rather than as a document about what somebody ought to do.
The limit worth stating out loud
None of this research is about my software. It supports the mechanisms the work is built on — self-determination, self-monitoring, ownership of your own time — not the product. I have no outcome study and I am not going to imply one. A program that starts recording will always look like a program doing more, which is a claim about the record rather than about anyone’s day. What the tools are built to capture is the argument on this page. What they change is not mine to claim yet.
Why I think this ends well
Every one of these ideas points the same way, and it is not a gloomy direction. People are not short on potential; they are short on repetitions — on chances to try something, get it a bit wrong, and notice the difference. A system built out of caution quietly removes those chances and looks responsible the whole time it is doing it. A system built out of trust hands them back.
That is now buildable, cheaply, by people who are not engineers, inside programs that already exist. It does not need a rebuild or a budget cycle to start — it needs one person deciding that the day their team actually lives is worth recording truthfully. That is a much better position to be in than the field has ever been in before, and it is the reason I find this work hopeful rather than heavy.
References
- Burke, K. M., Shogren, K. A. et al. — Self-Determination Research: Current and Future Directions. Behavioral Sciences 14, 613 (2024).
- Burke, K. M., Blaskowitz, M. G., Amaya, A. et al. — Self-Determination and Inclusive Postsecondary Education for Students with Intellectual Disability: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Inclusive Postsecondary Education (2024). ERIC EJ1441966.
- Schillaci, R. S., Parker, C. E., Grigal, M. & Paiewonsky, M. — College-Based Transition Services’ Impact on Self-Determination for Youth With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 59(4), 269–282 (2021).
- Milton, D. E. M. — On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society 27(6), 883–887 (2012).
- Kilgallon, E., Botha, M. & Dwyer, P. — What the Double Empathy Problem Is (and Is Not). Autism in Adulthood (2026).
- Mize, M., Park, Y. & Carter, A. — Technology-based self-monitoring system for on-task behavior of students with disabilities: A quantitative meta-analysis of single-subject research. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 38(3), 668–680 (2022).
- Sulu, M. D., Martella, R. C., Grimmet, K. et al. — Investigating the Effects of Self-Monitoring Interventions with Students with Disabilities on the Maintenance and Generalization of On-Task Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 10(3), 458–476 (2022).
- Mehrabian, A. & Wiener, M. — Decoding of Inconsistent Communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 6(1), 109–114 (1967); Mehrabian, A. & Ferris, S. R. — Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology 31(3), 248–252 (1967).
Where to go next
Who is saying this · The writing · Free tools · arvi@tervik.org