Impact of instruction on development of deaf children's originality of thinking.

Abstract

Presently there are four different methods (Kohl, 1966) employed in the instruction of deaf children: (a) the pure oral method, (b) the oral method, (c) the natural language method, and (d) the Rochester or combined system method Conflicting views exist about the relative usefulness of these methods or their combinations. However, the originality scores obtained on Torrance's Thinking Creatively With Picrures Test might favor deaf children taught under the natural language method as opposed to those taught under the combined system method. The 35 second grade deaf boys and girls came from a School for the Deaf located in the Southeastern United States and were of different ages, mental, and hearing abilities. These Ss were divided at the beginning of the year into four classes, each one being taught by a different teacher. Three classes (N = 27) were taught by teachers who employed the combined-system method while the fourth class (N = 8) was taught by a teacher who used the natural language method. In the first task of the creativity tesr, Thinking Creatively With Pictures, Form A (Torrance, 1966), Ss are asked to draw a picture in which a piece of colored paper shaped like a pear with adhesive backing is an integral part. In the second task, Ss draw pictures by adding lines to 10 incomplete figures. In the third task, pictures using 30 pairs of parallel lines are drawn. In each task, Ss are instructed to produce pictures which are both unusually original and extremely elaborate. These tasks involve acquisition of information from relationships among stimuli which are seen repeatedly and perceiving stimuli in different ways. After the imposed time on each task was over, a teacher for the deaf helped Ss record their titles individually. Each task was scored for originality by the writer according to the standard scoring directions. This score is determined for each response separately and is based on the weight given each response. Responses showing statistical infrequency were assigned scoring weights of two points; obvious, irrelevant, and incomprehensible responses were assigned weights of zero. The means (and standard deviations) for groups with the natural language method and the combined-system method were 26 (4.3) and 22.7 (6.8) respectively (t = 1.66; F = 2.45, df = 1, 0 > .Or). These Ss constitute two independent groups and the measure of originality constitutes an ordinal scale. The results obtained by applying the MannWhitney U test indicate that the quality and quantity of creative originality scores of these two groups of deaf children is not a sufficient basis for concluding that either method of instruction is superior.