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THE STUDY examined attitudes toward teaching reported by university instructors who normally teach hearing students (with the occasional deaf or hard of hearing student) and by instructors who normally teach deaf and hard of hearing students at the same institution. Overall, a view of instruction as information transmission was associated with a teacher-focused approach to instruction, whereas viewing instruction as a means of promoting conceptual change was associated with a student-focused approach. Instructors in mainstream classrooms were more oriented toward information transmission than conceptual change, whereas instructors experienced in separate classrooms for deaf and hard of hearing students reported seeking to promote conceptual change in students and adopting more student-focused approaches to teaching. These results are consistent with previous findings concerning instructors' approaches to teaching and deaf and hard of hearing students' approaches to learning, and may help explain recent findings regarding student outcomes in separate versus mainstream secondary classrooms.

READING ACHIEVEMENT among deaf students typically lags significantly behind hearing peers, a situation that has changed little despite decades of research. This lack of progress and recent findings indicating that deaf students face many of the same challenges in comprehending sign language as they do in comprehending text suggest that difficulties frequently observed in their learning from text may involve more than just reading. Two experiments examined college students' learning of material from science texts. Passages were presented to deaf (signing) students in print or American Sign Language and to hearing students in print or auditorially. Several measures of learning indicated that the deaf students learned as much or more from print as they did from sign language but less than hearing students in both cases. These and other results suggest that challenges to deaf students' reading comprehension may be more complex than is generally assumed.

CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION between deaf students was modeled using a question-and-answer game. Participants consisted of student pairs that relied on spoken language, pairs that relied on American Sign Language (ASL), and mixed pairs in which one student used spoken language and one signed. Although the task encouraged students to request clarification of messages they did not understand, such requests were rare, and did not vary across groups. Face-to-face communication was relatively poor in all groups. Students in the ASL group understood questions more readily than students who relied on oral communication. Although comprehension was low for all groups, those using oral communication provided more correct free responses, although the numbers were low; no significant differences existed for multiple-choice responses. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that many deaf students have developed lower criteria for comprehension, and related challenges for classroom communication access.

TWO EXPERIMENTS EXPLORED the taxonomic organization of mental lexicons in deaf and hearing college students. Experiment 1 used a single-word association task to examine relations between categories and their members. Results indicated that both groups' lexical knowledge is similar in terms of overall organization, with associations between category names and exemplars stronger for hearing students; only the deaf students showed asymmetrical exemplar-category relations. Experiment 2 used verbal analogies to explore the application of taxonomic knowledge in an academically relevant task. Significant differences between deaf and hearing students were obtained for six types of analogies, although deaf students who were better readers displayed response patterns more like hearing students'. Hearing students' responses reflected their lexical organization; deaf students' did not. These findings implicate the interaction of word knowledge, world knowledge, and literacy skills, emphasizing the need to adapt instructional methods to student knowledge in educational contexts.

Samplings of deaf and hearing sign language interpreters were studied to assess the effects of spoken English and sign language fluency on automaticity in word and sign recognition. The Stroop task was used. Responding in sign took longer and led to more Stroop interference than responding verbally. The inclusion of interpreters showed this response had nothing to do with hearing status. The deaf subjects showed more automaticity in identifying signs than words, with the reverse result for hearing subjects. This result was not affected by language fluency.

The link between relational and distinctive information in memory for prose was tested in hearing-impaired adolescents and hearing children by having them read simple texts and administering recall and recognition exams. Results showed that deaf and hard of hearing students remembered abstract materials as well as concrete materials. However, hearing-impaired students are less likely to remember idea units holistically within passages, recalling individual words better. When sentences were presented without global paragraph coherence, there were no differences between the two groups.

Pediatric cochlear implantation has successfully provided many congenitally deaf children the opportunity to learn to hear and speak. However, outcomes are mostly assessed through formal audiological testing or by gathering perspectives of parents and teachers rather than the children themselves. Sixty-five children with cochlear implants (CIs) aged 11–15 years were asked about their CI use and other factors related to communication, experiences of hearing loss, social participation and friendships, and psychological well-being. The findings revealed diverse experiences; e.g. 55.4% of the children reported feeling different from others their age, while 18.5% reported trying to hide their CIs often or all the time. The findings also suggested diversity in communication needs: 41.5% reported being interested in learning more sign language. The study highlights the importance of providing tailored, flexible support for a heterogeneous population of children with varied strengths and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RESEARCH SHOWS that deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students frequently enter college and the workplace relatively unprepared for success in math, science, and reading. Based on data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2), the present study focused on DHH students' college and career readiness by investigating their opportunities in secondary school to acquire college and career skills. DHH students earned more credits overall than hearing peers; both groups earned a similar number of credits in academic courses. However, DHH students took more vocational and nonacademic courses and fewer courses in science, social science, and foreign languages. There was evidence that DHH students' academic courses in math lacked the rigor of those taken by hearing peers, as DHH students earned more credits in basic math and fewer credits in midlevel math courses, and even fewer in advanced math courses, than hearing peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]