Grants and Projects

The Use of Ecobehavioral Assessment to Identify Naturally Occurring Effective Teaching Strategies for Deaf Students and the Investigation of Research-based Strategies for Employing Active Student Responding

M. Lynn Woolsey

lwoolsey@unf.edu  

The President's educational mandate, "Leave no child behind" sets a high bar for educators serving deaf students because deaf students have been left behind their hearing peers since the formal beginnings of deaf education. They remain so today. Demographic data indicate that options and successes for deaf adults remain below the national standard. Compared to their hearing peers, deaf students lag far behind in school achievement scores. Deaf children have a higher incidence of behavior problems, mental health issues, and problems with adjustment.

Although educators recognize the high incidence of additional disabilities in deaf children, many teachers are unprepared to effectively serve the variety of needs of the students in their room. Indeed, educators of the deaf still struggle with a very basic educational question: How do we effectively teach deaf students? Applied research with hearing students has confirmed that academic achievement is related to specific classroom variables and correlated with academic responding. One of the original hypotheses regarding low achievement scores of poor performing children in urban settings was that the children experienced academic delay and remained delayed because of the lack of active instructional demands made on them in the classroom. This study will use an ecobehavioral assessment tool (MS-CISSAR) and a series of single subject designs to (a) describe and confirm the relationship between academic achievement and academic responding in deaf students; (b) identify and provide a description of naturally occurring effective procedures used by exemplary teachers of the deaf that lead to increased percentages of academic responding in high and low achieving deaf students and (c) investigate the effect of three specific active student responding activities and the naturally occurring effective procedures on the levels of active student responding and student achievement. Armed with empirically-based instructional strategies, teachers of the deaf can be more confident that they will leave no deaf child behind.