Learning and Cognition

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Learning and Cognition

• Presented by Ellen Axmear, Danielle Cady, Bambi
  Owens

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20 QUESTIONS!
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Problem Solving 20 Questions!
Deaf Children Hearing
Children
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Findings

• Deaf and hearing children who had played the game
  before were equally likely to use winning
  strategies. However, inexperienced hearing
  children typically discovered the correct
  strategy, whereas inexperienced deaf peers did
  not.
• Reflectivity and impulsivity was unrelated to
  problem solving performance in children and
  revealed no effects of hearing status.
• Exposure of early effective access to language
  may have an impact on their performance.
• Research suggests that in the past deaf children
  have been taught to be more concrete and literal.

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Sorting Stimulus Cards in Three Dimensions Olson
Study (1953)
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• Hearing students obtained a 60 accuracy.
• Deaf student obtained a 25 accuracy (with
  teacher feedback).
• This study shows that
• Deaf children think concretely, in terms of
  objects and attributes, rather than in terms of
  classes and inter-item situation similarities.
  
• Deaf children are distracted by irrelevant
  dimensions of a problem

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Piagets Rule of Conservation
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Solving Word Problems
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Findings

• Deaf students tended to solve the word problems
  in isolation from their immediate prior
  experience with the numeric/graphic problems.
• Reading ability levels of the deaf students
  directly influenced their problem-solving
  performance on word problems.
• Generally the deaf students had no difficulty
  reading and understanding the word problems and
  performed comparably to the hearing students.
• Deaf students showed computation errors rather
  than procedural errors, suggesting carelessness
  and lack of focus.
• Deaf students left a considerable amount of
  answers blank.

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Findings

• Deaf comments tended to be negative and their
  approaches seemed to be disengaged.
• Their expressed desire to avoid word problems
  indicates that a number of the students were not
  mentally or emotionally ready to deal with the
  text information, which perhaps increased their
  tendency to leave the words blank.
• For the word problems they completed or attempted
  to complete, insufficient focus and a lack of
  persistence could have affected their
  concentration.
• Focus and confidence are critically important for
  good problem solving.

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Assessment A Dilemma

• Nonverbal determining cognitive developmental
  delays and/or learning disabilities.
• Nonverbal scales recommend to test deaf students
• Verbal component key component in understanding
  the true intellectual functioning of a student.
• If we do not include verbal abilities in the
  assessment of deaf children, we must accept the
  fact that we are only tapping one part of
  intelligence as it is typically understood
  (Marschark Everhart, 1993).

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• Research concerning the cognitive underpinnings
  and the assessment of learning by deaf students
  show that learning, knowledge organization, and
  approaches to problem solving differ from their
  hearing peers (Marschark Lukomski, 2002).

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Over the past 40 years, investigations of deaf
childrens cognitive functioning frequently have
reported them to perform below the levels of
hearing peers. These differences were found to be
developmental lags that either disappeared over
time or grew larger as the children became older.
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Cognitive Structure
Receptive Information
LTM
STM
Permanent Storage
Information Processing
Temporary Storage
Lost Information
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Memory in Cognition and Learning

• Hearing individuals rely on verbal sequential
  coding.
• Deaf people, in contrast, rely more heavily on
  visuospatial short-term memory codes.
• Hearing students tended to be somewhat more
  flexible.
• Important to look at individual differences in
  coding strategies.

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• Speech-based codes are somewhat more efficient
  than other codes for remembering sequential
  information.
• Deaf students with better speech skills tended to
  remember more.
• Sign language in memory coding
• Signs made with similar hand shapes tend to
  disrupt memory performance among deaf
  individuals, just as words that sound the same
  disrupt memory performance among hearing
  individuals.
• Spoken language was directly related to memory
  spans.
• Sign language was found to be inversely related
  to memory spans

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• Deaf and hearing individuals have the same
  working memory capacity, but
• The articulatory loop is essential for working
  memory and limits memory span to the amount that
  can be articulated in two seconds.
• Hearing children interpret auditory input at two
  seconds.
• Deaf children process visual information at a
  slower rate because fewer ASL signs can fit into
  the loop in that amount of time.

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Memory Strategies

• Deaf and hearing children encode information
  differently.
• Route memorization is not effective with deaf
  children.
• Deaf children need strategies to carry
  information from short-term memory to long-term
  memory.

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• It is important to recognize that individuals
  vary in how much they know about different
  things, how that information is organized, and
  that both can affect the accessibility and
  availability of knowledge.

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Building Schema

• When hearing children transfer information from
  short-term to long-memory information is then
  assimilated into classes.
• Deaf children have difficulty with rapid access
  and organization of long-term memory.
• Example A shot of sunlight burst from the cage,
  and the canary was gone

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• When considering learning and cognition, one must
  consider how language is involved in both
  processes. We must, then, ask ourselves two
  questions
• How does language impact learning? and
• How does language impact cognition?

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Does language play a role in learning?

• YES!
• Although deaf students have more access to
  language than in the past, they continue to
  struggle in several academic domains. This is
  most evident in reading and writing.
• Teachers need to know that language does
  influence cognitive functioning and academic
  abilities of their deaf students.

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How does language play a role?

• Early exposure of language appears to predict
  later academic successes.
• Early exposure to sign language also appears to
  be a significant predictor of academic success.
• Children who are not exposed to language at an
  early age are more likely to lag behind in the
  acquisition of literacy skills.
• English-based literacy skills are essential to
  academic and employment success.
• Much of what is acquired through the middle
  school and high school years is through reading.
• Language is interwoven throughout all of the
  academic areas.

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Application for Teachers

• Communicating efficiently with the childhood
  intervention team.
• Encourage parents to provide a language rich
  environment when their childs first years by
  using all sources of communication.
• Provide community resources to parents.
• Provide students with appropriate curriculum
  modifications.
• Establish ongoing communication with the
  students mainstream teachers.
• And most importantly read, read, read!

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Does language play a role in cognition?

• YES!
• Communication barriers are usually linked to
  delayed cognitive development.
• Different language exposure as young children
  affect cognitive organization and cognitive
  functioning.

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How do we encourage cognition?

• Structure teaching/learning situations around
• Creating a language rich environment
• Modeling (before, during, and after)
• Encouraging Inquiry
• Accessing background knowledge
• Building schemas and sub-schemas
• Providing hands on experiences
• Clarifying underlying meanings and intentions

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Application to Literature Instruction

• Direct Instruction hands on
• Emphasis on pictorial materials
• Repeated readings (improve reading rate and
  recognition accuracy)
• Incorporation of multi-sensory information
  sources.
• Encourage Inference-making
• Low-level, high interest books
• Content movies
• Foster relational processing and information
  integration

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Conclusion

• Research has shown that although deaf and hearing
  children have equal cognitive capacities, deaf
  children need specific tools to access, organize,
  and retrieve language to enable successful
  learning.
• So what does this mean for you?

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Works Cited
Kelly, Ronald R. Mousley, Keith. (2001).
Solving word problems more than reading issues
for deaf students. American Annals of the Deaf.
146 (3), 251-259. Marschark, Marc Everhart,
Victoria S. (1999). Problem solving by deaf and
hearing students twenty questions. Deafness and
Education International. 1 (2),
65-81. Marschark, Marc Everhart, Victoria S.
(). Understanding problem solving in deaf
children. Problem solving and cognitive
processes. 314-337. Marschark, Marc Lukomski,
Jennifer. (2002). Understanding language and
learning in deaf children. Cognition, Context,
and Deafness. 2-14.