Increasing the number and diversity of students majoring in science is a first step toward increasing the number and diversity of individuals employed in and making contributions in science and engineering fields. One subgroup of particular interest in this regard is individuals with significant hearing losses. Despite a long history of such individuals making contributions to science and technology, increased literacy demands, the nature of some scientific endeavors, and even technologies spawned by scientific progress have created barriers to engagement of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in scientific fields. Recent research has suggested that these barriers have little to do with hearing loss or communication per se, but are the product of differences in the way that deaf and hearing individuals learn and what they know. For example, the academic challenges previously attributed to deaf students' impoverished print literacy skills are also seen in their learning of science via sign language interpreting (two experiments have examined direct instruction from deaf teachers, but replications are needed). These and other findings have helped to reveal a common thread running through a variety of earlier findings indicating that (1) deaf students tend to engage in automatic, relational processing less frequently than hearing peers; (2) hearing students' concept knowledge is more strongly interconnected than deaf peers', partly accounting for (1), and (3) deaf students are less likely than hearing peers to accurately monitor ongoing comprehension. Taken together, these results suggest common cognitive underpinnings to deaf students' chronic underachievement in academic settings, including their well documented challenges in reading. Still to be determined are how these cognitive tendencies develop among deaf students, which students evidence them and which do not, and how we can adjust teaching methods in mainstream settings in order to ameliorate and/or accommodate these cognitive differences.
To help address these issues, the PI and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf will hold an international conference on "the cognitive underpinnings of science learning by deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals." The conference will include a two-day open meeting at which prominent investigators will make keynote presentations addressing the cognitive foundations of learning by students with hearing loss, focusing on how the complexities of science and science education potentially are affected by differences between deaf and hearing individuals. The public meetings will be followed by a day of discussions by the invitees and a group of science educators and researchers in order to develop both a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities of science education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students and to establish a national research agenda in this area. These aspects of the proposed activity, together with the likelihood that many of the issues elaborated also will apply to other students facing academic challenges reflect the broader impact of the proposed activity. The workshop will be hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and will be held in June 2007. The Oxford University Press will publish a scholarly book resulting from the conference.
