Teacher Coaching: Increasing Deaf Students’ Active Engagement Through Flexible Instructional Arrangements

The study examined the effects of a coaching intervention on teachers’ ability to implement academically responsive instruction through flexible instructional arrangements in self-contained classrooms for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, as well as the impact of instructional arrangements on students’ academic engagement. Using a changing criterion design replicated across teachers, three-teacher participants with diverse backgrounds received differentiated coaching to implement flexible instructional arrangements. Results showed that coaching had an impact on all three teachers’ implementation of flexible instructional arrangements. Concomitantly, students increased their active engagement and decreased passive engagement when they spent less time in whole class and more time in small group and child-managed arrangements. Teachers maintained the use of flexible instructional arrangements and students continued to be more actively engaged than pre-intervention. Limitations and implications for practice and research are discussed.

Developing Reading Skills in Prelingually Deaf Preschool Children: Fingerspelling as a Strategy to Promote Orthographic Learning

The aim of this study was to clarify whether fingerspelling provides a sophisticated mechanism that promotes the development of detailed orthographic knowledge for deaf individuals even in the absence of paralleling phonological knowledge. An intervention program comprised of various procedures chaining between fingerspelled sequences; their written correlates and meaning were administered in a multiple probe single-subject research design across semantic categories to four children with severe to profound prelingual hearing loss (age 4.2–6 years). Results demonstrate the occurrence of rapid orthographic learning during intervention and reliable retention of it in maintenance checks, despite the participants’ insufficiently developed phonological skills. Observations of the participants’ behavior further suggest fingerspelling to function as an effective mediator in the initial development of robust detailed orthographic lexicon. Analyzes also indicate that “learning through action” and “relevance to the task” provide two key factors in relation to the promotion of orthographic learning, with their absence creating an obvious vacuum in this regard. Insights from the study are discussed with reference to their implication for the development of learning materials and learning environments for prelingually deaf and other novice learners.

The School Career of Children With Hearing Loss in Different Primary Educational Settings—A Large Longitudinal Nationwide Study

Children with hearing loss (HL) are at risk for a lower educational achievement. This longitudinal study compared the school career of a nationwide Dutch cohort with and without HL based on descriptive data of the governmental authority Statistics Netherlands. From 2008 to 2018, 3,367,129 children, of whom 1,193 used cochlear implants (CIs) and 8,874 used hearing aids (HAs), were attending primary and/or secondary education. Sixty-one percent of children with HL attended mainstream and 31% special primary education. Compared to mainstreamed pupils without HL, mainstreamed pupils with HL achieved lower levels for language and mathematics in primary education but eventually attended comparable types of secondary education. Children with HL attending special primary education attained lower types of secondary education compared to mainstreamed peers with and without HL. These findings suggest that future educational (and as a result professional) attainment of a child with HL depends on the type of primary educational setting.

The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language

ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation analyses revealed that frequent signs were less iconic and phonologically simpler than infrequent signs and iconic signs tended to be phonologically simpler than less iconic signs. The complete ASL-LEX dataset and supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/zpha4/ and an interactive visualization of the entire lexicon can be accessed on the ASL-LEX page: http://asl-lex.org/.