Teachers’ Perceptions of Metacognitive Strategies and Assessments Used with Deaf Students

Abstract

The data were collected via two semi-structured interviews, five observations, and two experience sampling methods (ESM). The data collected were coded based on previous work: planning or before reading, monitoring or during reading, and evaluating after reading strategies (Baker & Brown,1984; Israel, 2007; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995; Schmitt, 2005). The first teacher taught d/Deaf and hard of hearing seventh graders with additional disabilities; their reading grades ranged from second grade to fifth grade. The second teacher had eighth grade students; their reading levels range from fifth grade to sixth grade. This school is located in a school district in the Midwestern part of the United States. Overall, the school district has approximately 400 students who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing. The findings across both case studies suggest that both teachers spent time to activate their students’ prior knowledge. Teaching vocabulary is a very important component of igniting prior knowledge in students. However, both teachers believed that teaching language is a complex task, and that teaching language is not simply teaching vocabulary; teaching language requires on-going social interactions and creating environments that include highlighting examples in different contexts. Students need to have language not only during reading instruction, but also through their interactions in different settings. Additionally, they explained that d/Dhh students are diverse. Some of their students have different prior knowledge in English and ASL than other students. Taken together, both teachers argue that all teachers should be aware of their students’ needs; for instance, all teachers in the field of reading and deafness need to have sufficient knowledge of the first language (home language) of their d/Dhh students. Teachers need to know their students’ language skills, and find creative means to develop their linguistic knowledge by utilizing a diverse array of activities that meet the learning needs of each individual student. Most language activities are mainly used during reading instruction. For example, some students rely on their prior knowledge while other students do not have prior knowledge of a topic. One teacher noted that some of her students have more knowledge in English, such as phonology, because they have residual hearing, or perhaps they experienced spoken language before they became deaf, which is also known as age at onset. The findings indicated that an individual must utilize the context and students’ prior knowledge in order to expand their vocabulary and develop more complex language. For example, when students have residual hearing, they have access to the language from an earlier stage of their life, and they can use their spoken language knowledge to understand the grammar. However, it was argued that these students still need more work to develop their knowledge of ASL. Additionally, these findings showed that teachers used many different mentoring strategies aside from planning or evaluating strategies. Also, both teachers only used think-aloud assessment to examine the type of metacognitive strategies that students retained during their reading sessions. Based on their teaching experiences, both teachers explained that reading instruction is one of the most challenging subjects for d/Dhh students. Interestingly, they noted that it was interesting teaching students with different characteristics. However, teaching in deaf education has additional challenges aside from teaching students outside of deaf education. Both teachers described that teaching mathematics was not more difficult than teaching reading. One of the participants argued that students still need to have language to communicate with them. Both teachers indicated a need to ensure that their students know the signs of some technical terms in mat