Two hundred twenty-two hearing-impaired and hearing educators of the deaf responded to a national survey of their attitudes toward sign communication modes: English-like or American Sign Language (ASL). The respondents also estimated their signing skills and their comprehension of their students' sign communications at the start of their careers and at the time of the survey. The results indicated that there is support for sign communication and development of a sign competency measure in teacher certification. There was a tendency for the educators to prefer an English-like sign mode overall. The hearing-impaired educators split almost evenly in their preferences for English-like or ASL sign mode. This support of sign contrasted with the reported poor levels of sign performance by the educators and a substantial inability to comprehend the sign communications of their students.

Using five different communication modes, 52 profoundly deaf students attending a residential school for the deaf were administered a videotaped presentation of a vocabulary test standardized for deaf and hearing-impaired populations. The five presentation modes used were: a) Total Communication (TC) with audio, b) TC without audio, c) Manual Communication with no mouth movement, d) Oral Communication (OC) with audio, and e) OC without audio. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups and tested individually. Response instructions were presented in the mode being tested. On the test, subjects pointed to the picture on a four-picture plate which most closely corresponded to the videotaped stimulus. Modes using MC yielded performances significantly superior to all other modes. There was no significant difference between MC, TC with audio, and TC without audio, nor between OC with and without audio.

What is the relative usefulness of measures of &dquo;intellectual ability&dquo; and self-conceptions of ability in the prediction of academic achievement among deaf children? This paper describes research concerning this question.In posing this question, it is assumed that performance (or &dquo;behavior&dquo;) is subject to the influence of more than one variable or condition at a time and that adequate explanations involve more than a single variable or condition. But, if several variables are proposed as being revelant to performance, it becomes necessary to take into account (or &dquo;measure&dquo;) both the influence of the variables on the behavior we are attempting to explain and their influence upon each other. In the course of the discussion which follows, an attempt will be made to show: (1) the utility of intellectual and personality variables in predicting academic achievement and (2) their relation to one another within the predictive situation.The power of prediction as an intellectual tool resides in the fact that it enables us to rigorously test the adequacy of various theoretical models that might be proposed. The user of this procedure assumes that if certain variables predict certain events in a fairly accurate way, they are more relevent to the behavior studied than those variables which do not. In terms of education, variables which are highly predictive of academic performance should be taken into account in programming to a greater extent than those variables which do not. Further, variables which are better predictors among a set of predictors deserve more attention. The isolation of variables which predict achievement represents the essence

The question of the relative importance of the cheremic dimensions of configuration, direction, and position to receptive sign reading was tested here. Direction, configuration, and position, in that order, were posited as the critically important cheremic dimensions. The results of testing two groups of college students who had recently learned a basic sign language skill supported the position taken here.