Empirical research of accessible educational materials for families with deaf in Southeast Asia and its implications for the national policy

• In Event: The impact of digital educational materials in sign language to the acceptance and recognition of sign languages as official languages

Proposal

Project TREE (Transforming Reading in Early Education) extended the work for WAY and was geared for deaf children between the ages of 3 to 8. This project was conducted in the Philippines, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. In each country, a team of deaf local community mentors implemented a 9-month intervention with families of deaf children. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether deaf children can learn new vocabulary from their interactions with storybooks and deaf mentors. The Repeated Acquisition Design (RAD) is a single-case research design with strengths that make it suitable for use in educational contexts, including its ability to assess interventions’ effectiveness in authentic settings (Kirby et al., 2021). This design also allows researchers to track skill development in various areas, such as vocabulary, alphabet knowledge, spelling, and numeracy. RAD has been adopted for this study to evaluate the impact of storybooks and deaf mentors on deaf children’s vocabulary development. Identical pre- and post-measurements were administered for each set of target behaviors. At the beginning and the end of the intervention in this study, deaf mentors followed a testing protocol that asked the child to view a picture of the target word and provide a sign, and vice versa. The child was also asked to produce a sign for the written word stimulus, and vice versa. Project TREE was socially valid and important to both the child and the wider community. Feedback was gathered from families and deaf mentors involved in this study to gauge their perspectives on the significance of this type of intervention.

Through Project TREE, learning data was collected as evidence to demonstrate deaf children’s ability to develop language(s). Such data are crucial for policy making and planning. To strengthen national policy relating to language recognition and educational language planning, various data documentation methods are required, such as linguistic documentation, learning documentation, and census collection. Furthermore, the project showed the impact of educational materials in deaf children’s language and content learning. Educational materials, such as signed storybooks, have documentation of sign language using a variety of deaf signers from all over the country. With technology, we can make bilingual educational materials available for a wider audience, including hearing children. Research has shown signed storybooks benefit not only deaf children but also hearing children in the areas of language learning and cultural appreciation. Using empirical data, we can support development, approval and implementation of national language recognition policy, including in the educational sector.

In addition to Project TREE, the RIT team primarily authored a standards guideline, Create a World of Deaf Readers: Standards for Sign Language Storybooks: A working paper from All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development. It will be disseminated globally. It is with hope that the guideline will help impact the national policy of sign language recognition in various sectors, including education, as it has standards for developing educational materials, especially sign language storybooks, which are much needed for deaf and hearing readers.

Authors

• Christopher Kurz, MSSE/NTID

• Patrick Graham, Rochester Institute of Technology