Multimedia Vocabulary Program for the Hearing Impaired

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The typically low performance of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in reading, comprehension, and language is well documented. This low performance results in severe academic problems in areas such as science and history. One central cause of this poor performance is that deaf students usually have limited and inadequate English vocabularies. While a variety of instruction methods have been shown to produce significant vocabulary growth with hearing students, little effort has been made to extend these methods into comprehensive, systematic curricula that are designed to meet the special needs of deaf students. This project will integrate such proven-effective methods with research-based curriculum design procedures and recent advances in interactive multimedia technology to develop an efficacious program to teach vocabulary to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. In Phase I, 20 multimedia vocabulary lessons employing graphics, animations, on-screen signing, movies and text will be produced and evaluated. The efficacy of the prototype lessons will be evaluated with both middle school and high school students having a range of English/American Sign Language (ASL) abilities. If the Phase I lessons are found effective, in Phase II we will developed an entire two-year curriculum and test its efficacy in a randomized control trial. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: This project will lead to the production of a 2 year multimedia program for teaching vocabulary to deaf and head-of-hearing middle school and high school students. It will be attractive to state, regional, and local schools with deaf and hard-of-hearing students, as well as to institutions which train teachers of the deaf.