Deaf Education and Literacy
There has been some means of measuring the progress of Deaf education and literacy but only in the form of some sort of estimation in scholar journal. I did some google search on statistical record keeping of progress in Deaf Education and Literacy and you can guess that there is very little materials. With more kids being mainstreamed, we have little means to collecting such statistics.
Does the US Department of Education have some form of requirement that schools are to keep track of all kids and their hearing loss? What about the type of tests they take to measure progress? We have the SAT and a number of other tests. Including specialized tests for the Deaf.
Are some required and others not? What about the communication method used in conveying the materials to the students?
Deaf Education has been around for a long time, yet we are no where close to providing the means of what works and what doesn't work. Are we going to continue down the path of blindly educating our Deaf students without the tools that are effective?
I know there are a lot of questions here and I'm hoping people will either verify that no such means of measuring the progress of Deaf education or literacy exists or point me to where such statistical data reside for observation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
As a parent of a deaf child, I find that testing his reading comprehension level is the best benchmark I can use to gauge his reading and writing ability.
ReplyDeleteI may be wrong, but I find reading comprehension a very important component in a deaf child's bag of tools. I encourage, and even insist on, ASL but not at the expense of mastering English.
I wonder if we could find statistics on reading comprehension but weighted by hearing loss?
A good friend of mine sent me an email stating the Gallaudet University of Research keeps some statistics and is usually published in the annual April issue of the American Annals of the Deaf. Yet indicated that there is still much to be desired in the area of statistic data collection.
ReplyDeleteThere is another way to find statistics is to ask VR counselors from all over the country. We, RCDs (Rehabilitation Counselors for the Deaf) tend to refer our Deaf and hard of hearing consumers to the psychologists and job evaluators for vocational evaluations. They test our consumers' level in reading, writing and math. In order to collect data, we would have to go through hundreds or even thousands of cases going back 5 years. It would be a huge task. Not only that, there are hundreds of VR offices in different counties in different states. It would be so great if Gallaudet has someone for this big job. This might be tough to do because there are confidentiality laws in different states.
ReplyDeleteI took a statistics course at NYU. There was an assignment for us to study the statistics on Deaf Education. To my disappointment, the statistics that I found were not updated. Some were from 1960s and they came from a few schools and some from 1970s and the info also focused on few places. Some statistics also came from old psychological books. It seems that there is no nationwide data on deaf and hoh students' ability in reading, writing and math.
I think this is something we need in order to have better education for deaf and hoh students. Those with better education have better chances of being placed in good colleges or job training programs after they graduate from high school. After training, they would have better chances of finding well-paying jobs.
This is why we need someone or an organization to collect statistics on deaf and hoh students from different schools and VR offices.