The proposed research is designed to enhance science-related education for at-risk students and others with diverse learning needs. Recent research has demonstrated that deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students come into the STEM classroom with less information than hearing peers and also learn less. Results consistently have shown that neither students' reading levels nor communication skills are sufficient to explain this situation. The proposed project will focus on the effects on learning of DHH students' comprehension monitoring skills and their relatively lesser content knowledge and infrequent use of integrative learning strategies. Experiments involve participants' reading or seeing presentations and then answering questions, summarizing content, and/or identifying other features of the presented information prior to learning assessments. With one exception, content is presented in signed, spoken, or written form. Students will make judgments about the expected accuracy of their responses; these and other methods will be used to assess their awareness of ongoing comprehension in addition to learning per se. It is expected that metacognitive accuracy will vary as a function of factors such as method of presentation, mode of communication, the nature of the material, and possibly several demographic variables. Of particular interest are measures of learning, ongoing comprehension monitoring, and the ways in which these influence each other. The research is expected to refute claims that deaf students' learning challenges are specific to printed materials or poor communication skills.
It has long been known that deaf students underachieve in STEM content areas compared to hearing classmates. These academic challenges often are laid at the feet of their relatively poor reading abilities. Surprisingly, however, our NSF-supported research found that deaf students typically do not learn any more from sign language or spoken language (depending on their preference) than they do from reading. At the same time, when taught by skilled teachers of the deaf, we showed that deaf students can learn as much as hearing students even when they come into the STEM classroom with less content knowledge. This project has shown that in mainstream (regular) classrooms, regardless of whether they were learning via through-the-air communication (sign language or spoken language) or reading, deaf students learn less than their hearing peers, but they also generally overestimate how much they are learning to a greater extent than their hearing peers. Believing that they are fully understanding the material, deaf students therefore are less likely to notice gaps in their comprehension, something that can happen both in the classroom and during studying. Improving deaf students' monitoring of their learning would allow them to better know when to ask questions, review material, or seek assistance outside of class. Several attempts to do this using methods that work for hearing students proved unsuccessful. For example, inserting a delay between study and test provided time for hearing students to digest the material and improved performance, but it did not improve performance for deaf students. Learning and comprehension monitoring were improved by creating a more structured learning context (Criterion-Referenced Instruction). In the context of previous research, the findings indicate that deaf students' lesser content knowledge leaves them less able to make active use of supporting materials such as vocabulary lists or "scaffolding" (outlining the main points of the content). The use of more structured teaching-learning situations is apparently one of the strategies used by experienced teachers of deaf students, who recognize ways in which they are different from hearing students and modify their teaching appropriately. Results from one of our studies indicated that such teachers strive for "conceptual change" in their students whereas teachers of hearing students are focused more on "information transfer." Taken together, this line of investigation showing the way toward improved STEM education for deaf students and others with special needs.
