CONCLUSIONS: COUNTING AND SIMPLE MATH

Research shows:


1) Hearing Impaired preschoolers are just as competent at some of the informal mathematical tasks as hearing preschoolers


2) When presented spatially, hearing impaired preschoolers are actually better than the hearing peers in presenting the right number of objects in an array


3) Teachers of Hearing Impaired preschoolers need to give them more opportunities to practice counting than would normally be offered to hearing peers.


4) It is very likely that Hearing impaired children start to fall behind simply from a lack of experience in counting. 


5) Current work on teaching Hearing Impaired children focuses on what informal mathematical methods hearing children invent and if the hearing impaired can do the same rather than on what informal mathematical methods the hearing impaired invent 


(recap of chapter 2; Nunes)

SIMPLE ADDITION; ADDING ON USING SIGN LANGUAGE

When learning simple addition, typical hearing children use their fingers in order to facilitate 'adding on'.  Say we have the problem 5 + 4, the hearing child will put up four fingers to help them add on from 5 to get their answer of nine.  However, a hearing impaired child being taught in sign language, is left at a disadvantage.  They use their hands to 'say' their numbers and therefore do not have fingers to count with.  In observing these children, Groen and Resnick found that some of these children 'invented' their own method of 'adding on' using sign language.  In the same problem 5 + 4 the child would start with a signed 5 on one hand and the sign for 4 on the other hand.  The hand with 5 would increase in increments of 1 while the hand with the 4 signed on it would decrease by increments of 1, until the hand that originally displayed a 4 signed a 0; then the child would know he had his answer on the hand that once displayed 5.

While my children (and many other hearing impaired children) do not use sign language, I felt I needed to document this observation in this blog, because methods for teaching hearing impaired children are not well known or researched.  My intentions of this section of the blog is to bring to light methods that work in teaching math to the hearing impaired children; in order to make education easier for them and help those who teach them know how to help them.

(called the signed algorithm found on page 41 of Teaching Mathematics to Deaf Children by Nunes)