Don’t Assume Deaf Students are Visual Learners

Abstract

In the education of deaf learners, from primary school to postsecondary settings, it frequently is suggested that deaf students are visual learners. That assumption appears to be based on the visual nature of signed languages—used by some but not all deaf individuals—and the fact that with greater hearing losses, deaf students will rely relatively more on vision than audition. However, the questions of whether individuals with hearing loss are more likely to be visual learners than verbal learners or more likely than hearing peers to be visual learners have not been empirically explored. Several recent studies, in fact, have indicated that hearing learners typically perform as well or better than deaf learners on a variety of visual-spatial tasks. The present study used two standardized instruments to examine learning styles among college deaf students who primarily rely on sign language or spoken language and their hearing peers. The visual-verbal dimension was of particular interest. Consistent with recent indirect findings, results indicated that deaf students are no more likely than hearing students to be visual learners and are no stronger in their visual skills and habits than their verbal skills and habits, nor are deaf students’ visual orientations associated with sign language skills. The results clearly have specific implications for the educating of deaf learners.

Social Maturity and Executive Function Among Deaf Learners

“…Recent research (see Archbold, 2015;Harris, 2016, for reviews) has demonstrated significant benefits of cochlear implantation to young deaf children's speech and language, school achievement, and social-emotional functioning (the last usually according to parent reports). Benefits to achievement, however, largely have been found to disappear by high school and college age (Geers & Hayes, 2011;Geers et al, 2008;Harris & Terlektsi, 2010;Marschark, Shaver et al, 2015), at which time there also appears to be little if any difference between deaf individuals with and without CIs across a variety of cognitive domains (Figueras et al, 2008;Marschark, Spencer et al, 2015;Marschark, Paivio et al, 2016). As noted earlier, this finding has been suggested to reflect greater difficulty and differing goals of reading at the high school level (Archbold, 2015), the need for longer term interventions following cochlear implantation (Nittrouer & Caldwell-Tarr, 2016) or the involvement of alternative cognitive and environmental factors.…”

Accessible Computer Science for K-12 Students with Hearing Impairments

“…There is a diversity of learning styles among normal students, they could be verbal, visual or a different type of learners. Therefore, it's crucial to include all possible learning styles for deaf students' e-learning techniques [33,34].…”

Total Communication Learning Model: Using pictures, writing and reading to increase language capacity for deaf children

“…In recent times, information technology and internet network are now being employed in educating deaf children [24,25], and this allows sign language to be combined with oral language [26]. Other learning models make use of written illustrations that are very easy to understand accompanied by visualization of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and other figures [27].…”