LEARNING STYLES OF HEARING IMPAIRED VS HEARING INDIVIDUALS

Researchers were interested to know if Hearing Impaired individuals tend to have poor number skills from the beginning and if not then when the break down occurred.  What they found was that young Hearing Impaired children actually had stronger number skills than their hearing peers, but as it is expected that children develop their counting skills, the hearing impaired children quickly drop behind.


Research has shown that Hearing Impaired (HI) individuals and Hearing individuals have different learning styles.    The HI population code information visually, whereas hearing individuals code information phonologically (or sound based).  These two learning styles have different uses.  Visual memory is useful for recalling location and phonological memory is good for recalling order or serial recall.  In addition to this studies have indicated that HI children have the same ability as hearing children to recall items, but if there is a specific order the items must be recalled in (serial recall), then HI children would perform worse than their hearing peers. 


Counting is by far the most difficult task that a hearing impaired child needs to accomplish.   If we take the skill of counting and classify it by these learning styles, it is obviously a task of serial recall of phonological items; in order to count you must recall the number words in a fixed order.  So the task of counting is more difficult for HI children than the hearing, regardless of if it is represented visually or orally, because it requires serial recall.  The fact that it is orally based just complicates things further.


 Not all languages are equal when it comes to learning to count.  Japanese and Chinese are among the easiest languages to learn to count in.  Counting in English requires memorization of the numbers 1-20 and then applying  the use of counting rules after that.  It was determined that when a child is able to count to 60, they are likely able to count to 99.  So a solid counter would be one who is able to count to 60.  In 1998 Nunes and Moreno found that HI children in 2nd and 3rd grade were still not able to count to 60, where as hearing children were able to count to 60 early in their 1st grade year if not sooner.  They also found that many HI 4th graders were still unable to count to 60.  The patterns of mistakes that HI children seemed to make were related to phonological confusion.  For example: 15, 16, 17, 18, 81, 82, etc., which error is not found in hearing children.


It was determined that it is very likely that hearing impaired children start to fall behind simply because they lack sufficient experience counting (pg 48).


(This information can be found on pages  25-30 & 48 of Teaching Mathematics to deaf Children by Nunes)