Single-Factor Fallacy

This article reviews the literature on interaction between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children. An ongoing study of interaction between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children is then outlined. The first phase examined the communication that occurred when 12 hearing-impaired children interacted with two communication partners: a normally hearing teacher and a normally hearing peer. No difference was found between the hearing-impaired children’s number of speaking turns in the two situations. Their speaking turns tended to be longer, however, with peers than with teachers. These differences were explored through a qualitative analysis. The next phase of the study, which aims to take an in-depth look at communication between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children during a structured communication task, is then outlined and its educational implications are suggested.

This article reviews the literature on interaction between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children. An ongoing study of interaction between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children is then outlined. The first phase examined the communication that occurred when 12 hearing-impaired children interacted with two communication partners: a normally hearing teacher and a normally hearing peer. No difference was found between the hearing-impaired children’s number of speaking turns in the two situations. Their speaking turns tended to be longer, however, with peers than with teachers. These differences were explored through a qualitative analysis. The next phase of the study, which aims to take an in-depth look at communication between hearing-impaired and normally hearing children during a structured communication task, is then outlined and its educational implications are suggested.

Differences in IQ between deaf children of hearing parents (HP), deaf children of deaf parents (DP) and hearing children (HC) may be due to differences in speed of information processing. The Hick paradigm was used to obtain reaction times (RT) and movement times (MT) from samples of HP ( N = 31), DP ( N = 31), and HC ( N = 37) adolescents. Results show that DP subjects have faster RTs and MTs than HP or HC subjects ( ts ≥ 2.43, ps < .01), and that greater sign language exposure is related to faster MT ( r 2 = .180, p < .0005). HC subjects have higher IQs than HP subjects ( t = 2.66, p < .01), but DP IQs are not different from either group ( ts < 1.96, NS). The results show that Performance IQs (PIQs) obscure important differences between HP, HC and DP groups. Results are discussed in light of their theoretical and educational implications.

This study explores how preschoolers with cochlear implants process numerical comparisons from two different inputs: a) nonverbal (analogical) and b) verbal (symbolic). Preschool cochlear-implanted children (CI) ranging in age from 4;3 to 6;1 were compared with 99 age-matched hearing children (HC) in three numerical tasks: verbal counting, a digit comparison and a dot comparison. Results show that CI children may outperform HC in numerical tasks that require visuo-spatial analysis (e.g. analogical comparison). More importantly, they perform as well as HC in numerical tasks that require symbolic processes (digit comparison) and in verbal counting. However, when the influence of children's verbal counting skills on digit comparison is examined differences between the two groups emerge. HC's capacity to compare digits was influenced by their knowledge of the verbal counting system, but this knowledge was not influential when CI children's performance in the same task was considered. These findings suggest that different strategies may characterize the way the two groups tackle symbolic numerical comparisons. The educational and instructional implications of these findings are discussed.

Television viewing patterns of deaf and hearing children were compared. Children represented three age groups (grades 3, 6, 9). Parents filled out questionnaires regarding amount of viewing, when children watched television, who makes the viewing decisions, and preferences of the children for different program types. Research results showed deaf children watched more television than hearing children at all ages. Deaf children were given more responsibility in choosing amounts of viewing. Distinct patterns emerged for each group of subjects (by sex, grade, and hearing ability). No evidence was found for deaf children's reliance on visual programs. Suggestions for further research, implications for education and broadcasting, as well as possible explanations for the high amounts of TV viewing by deaf children are described.

Working memory is a limited capacity system in which information is temporarily stored and processed. Its optimal functioning is essential for educational attainment from the earliest grade. The working memory system enables the storage and mental manipulation of information during classroom learning activities that are crucial for the acquisition of complex skills and knowledge. Given the South African Department of Education's commitment to inclusive education, it was deemed important to consider the visual working memory functioning of deaf learners and how this may differ, if at all, from that of hearing children. In this study, the visuospatial components of working memory were assessed in 24 deaf children and 15 matched, hearing children, to determine what, if any, differences existed between these groups. The results indicated that the hearing children scored significantly higher than the deaf children on virtually all components of visuospatial short-term and working memory. The implication of this finding is that teachers need to assist the academic progress of deaf learners in the inclusive classroom by reducing the demands on working memory. The article provides suggestions for how this can be accomplished.

Despite the advances in technology and sign language awareness, many Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children have language delays as a consequence of difficulty accessing a language model. These delays are often particularly pronounced in the domain of pragmatics, where the language user takes into account the people they are communicating with and their shared access to current context. This review considers the effect childhood deafness can have on pragmatic development, reviewing studies of the pre-linguistic stage, early linguistic communication and more advanced pragmatics as measured both by general pragmatic checklists and more specific assessments of information structure and inference, deception and non-literal language (including sarcasm), and conversation. Where present, delays are consistently explained by the cumulative effects of access to a fluent natural language model, which affects both the acquisition of linguistic forms and the social and cognitive skills needed to use them in interaction. Implications for educators are briefly considered.

Reviews Audiology for the School Speech-Language Clinician , John Greer Clark, M.A., 184 pp., $14.75, Charles C Thomas, 301-327 East Lawrence Avenue, Springfield , III., 1980. This text offers the basics of audiology in an educational framework. To an educational audiologist, this thin volume is happily received. In the majority of small school systems where audiologists are not employed, the school speechlanguage clinician needs to be versed in the identification of hearing-impaired children, the ramifications of their losses, and appropriate therapy and management techniques for them. Too many educators only know hearing-impaired children as "those kids who need to sit up front." Mr. Clark's book provides a good overview of pathologies of the hearing mechanism, central auditory disorders, educational implications, and therapy management as well as hearing aids and how to explain audiological testing results to teachers and parents. While the book has a few minor drawbacks, it provides state-of-the-art material in educational audiology. The section which notes the advantages of combining pure tone testing with impedance audiometry is timely and useful; however, expecting a school speech-language clinician to have time to perform accurate air and bone conduction testing is somewhat unrealistic. Most speech-language clinicians barely have enough time to supply speech services to their large caseloads. The chapter on hearing aids carefully explores all types of wearable amplification but erroneously equates volume control with hearing aid gain and fails to mention the obvious disadvantages of eyeglass aid fittings. Lastly, while Mr. Clark presents information regarding the potential educational loss a child with mild hearing loss can suffer, in another chapter he states the impedance testing results have "little practical implication toward classroom management" (p. 135). This is misleading because abnormal impedance results may be only indication of a fluctuating mild hearing loss, which often causes behavior problems, missed directions, and incomplete school work. AU in all, while there are minor flaws in this text, it provides a good basic reference about audiology for speech-language clinicians. For those who may not be up on new developments, it offers some of the latest information on impedance, central auditory disorder management , and the field of educational audiology. It is information needed by speech professionals in education. Catherine R. Dykstra, M.A., CCCIA Board of Education of Frederick County Frederick, Md. 21701 Cognition to Language: Categories, Word Meanings, and Training, Mabel Rice, Ph.D., 203 pp., University Park Press, 233 East Redwood Street, Baltimore, Md., 21202, 1980. Rice presents a training study of color names with normal intelligence, hearing children (Chapter 4) within a larger context of theoreticals and applied concerns. The results of the training study challenge the traditional notions of the relationship between comprehension and production and demonstrate a relationship between these two aspects of language processing and the development of nonlinguistic categorization. In the first chapter, Rice presents both an historical and theoretical perspective on the relationship between language and cognition that, along with the second chapter on the specifics of categorization and how it is measured, provides an excellent overview of current developments to those who may feel that their training has left them unprepared to deal with these new directions in psycholinguistics. In this sense, the book is not for beginners, but rather for those who are either theoreticians in the field of language and cognition or those who are already involved in the hands-on problems of remediation of language problems. The issues raised in Chapters 3 and 5, on how to establish the nature of the links between language and cognition and how to interpret the results once obtained, are of direct relevance to those engaged in testing theoretical models of the early development of language as a function of cognitive processes. The issues addressed in Chapter 6, on the training of word meanings as a part of overall language intervention, may be applied to clinic and classroom with children of varying special problems. For the teachers of the deaf, particularly those involved in early preschool development, the concepts presented in this book have special import. Understanding the nature of underlying cognition, or at least what the debate is about is a prerequisite to the...

This study examined the impact of school-based, teacher-rated parental involvement on four child outcomes: language development, early reading skills, and positive and negative measures of social-emotional development. The 28 children were assessed for outcomes between 9 to 53 months post-graduation from a birth-to-3 early intervention (EI) program for children with hearing loss. Other factors included in the study were child's hearing loss, mother's education level, mother's current communication skills with her child, and maternal use of additional services beyond those offered by the early intervention program or the child's school program. Parental involvement in children's school-based education program is a significant positive predictor to early reading skills but shares considerable variance with maternal communication skill for this outcome. In this study, maternal communication skills and the child's hearing loss were the strongest predictors for language development. Maternal use of additional services was the strongest predictor to poorer social-emotional adjustment. The study's findings indicate that although parental involvement in their deaf child's school-based education program can positively contribute to academic performance, parental communication skill is a more significant predictor for positive language and academic development. Factors associated with parental involvement, maternal communication, and use of additional services are explored and suggestions are offered to enhance parental involvement and communication skills.

Deaf youth easily become communicatively isolated in public schools, where they are in a small minority among a majority of hearing peers and teachers. This article examines communicative strategies of deaf children in an American "mainstream " school setting to discover how they creatively manage their casual communicative interactions with hearing peers across multimodal communicative channels, visual and auditory. We argue that unshared sociolinguistic practices and hearing‐oriented participation frameworks are crucial aspects of communicative failure in these settings. We also show that what look like "successful" conversational interactions between deaf and hearing children actually contain little real language and few of the complex communication skills vital to cognitive and social development. This study contributes to understanding the social production of communicative isolation of deaf students and implications of mainstream education for this minority group.

Purpose Learning spoken words can be challenging for children with hearing loss who communicate orally and who are known to have weaker oral vocabulary skills than age-matched children who hear. Since vocabulary skills play a crucial role in reading and literacy acquisition, and academic success, it is important to identify effective vocabulary acquisition strategies for children with hearing loss. The aim of this study was to examine whether the incidental presence of orthography can facilitate oral vocabulary learning in children with hearing loss and whether the benefits are greater than those found in hearing children. Method We taught novel picture-word pairs with or without spellings to 23 children with hearing loss and 23 age-matched controls, ranging in age from 6 to 12 years. Word learning was assessed using behavioral and eye tracking data from picture naming and picture-word matching tasks. Results and Conclusions Results revealed an orthographic facilitation effect on oral vocabulary learning in children with hearing loss, with benefits being maintained over a week. Importantly, children with hearing loss showed a greater benefit of orthography than age-matched hearing peers on the picture naming tests. The results of this study have important implications for classroom instruction and vocabulary instruction strategies for children with hearing loss.

Lessons from LOCHI.

The study assessed Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in a group of oral deaf children and in their hearing mothers using a battery of ToM tasks. It also investigated the connection between mother and child in ToM performance. Participants were: 17 oral deaf children (aged 5 to 14 years) were paired by gender, age, and mental age with 17 hearing children; 17 hearing mothers of deaf children and 17 hearing mothers of hearing children. Compared to the hearing children, the deaf children faced difficulties in all ToM tests, and the hearing mothers of the deaf children were less capable than the mothers of the hearing children in all the ToM tests. Further, a specific ToM interaction model was found between the hearing mothers and the deaf children. The results confirmed ToM poor performance faced by the oral deaf children, showed the ToM level of hearing mothers of deaf children, and the ToM style of hearing mothers–deaf children dyads. Also, findings underline some educational implications related to the socio-relational origin of the ToM deficit in oral deaf children.

This article explores the potential of a critical pedagogy of race in high school classrooms to foster civic engagement and academic development. We begin with an exploration of the role of white supremacy in “race-neutral” curricula in US schools. Even as the largest 60 school districts in the nation are 80 % non-white and states such as California and New York move toward non-white pluralities in their school systems, curricula remain largely unchanged. We outline some of the larger systemic inequities that result from this often alienating and exclusive approach to teaching in city schools, and we conclude this first section by acknowledging various efforts to name and resist racially oppressive curricula and pedagogies. The second section of the article provides a brief historical context for the Ethnic Studies movement as a response to white supremacist curriculum and instruction in high school and college classrooms. We trace this movement back to its inception in the 1960s to provide a framing for our work. Our goal is to show that (1) the tradition of teaching Ethnic Studies in the high school is as old as the movement itself; (2) the teaching of Ethnic Studies has always been tied to both academic development and civic engagement; and (3) Ethnic Studies courses and content have been infused across disciplines and taught to racially heterogeneous groups since the outset of the movement. The third section of the paper will focus on three case studies of the critical pedagogy of Ethnic Studies with high school students. Two of these cases are of high school classes and the third explores a summer and after-school program where high school students engage in youth participatory action research projects around issues impacting youth of color in their neighborhoods and communities. Across each of these cases, we define our conception of a critical pedagogy of race and we explore the connections between the teaching of Ethnic Studies and the development of literacies of power, agency, social awareness, civic engagement, and academic achievement. We conclude the article with implications for pedagogy, policy, and praxis in city schools.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have received much attention in higher education; however, evidence about MOOCs at the K-12 level is scarce. To shed light on the phenomenon, we use the i-MOOC that aims at fostering upper secondary level students’ information literacy. The i-MOOC is a blended MOOC developed and refined in a design research process; it meets established criteria for high-quality MOOCs. In 2020, 1032 upper secondary level students in German-speaking Switzerland took the i-MOOC; the sample comprises N = 167 students who voluntarily filled in a questionnaire. The students are mainly from high schools and vocational schools. Learning effects are captured with a performance test. Information literacy gains are significant and medium in size: d = 0.75. The technology acceptance of students is evaluated using the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2). Student technology acceptance of K-12 MOOCs is primarily driven by hedonic motivation, i.e., perceived fun and entertainment. However, this type of motivation negatively predicts learning gains. Implications for teachers and educational decision makers are discussed.