Abstract
The evidence base for educational interventions for deaf students has been, and continues to be, called into question due to a lack of “gold standard” research available to support it. Yet the paucity of research in deaf education is not only in the volume of research that meets rigorous standards but also in its lack of attention to and inclusion of a deaf-centered perspective on the inferences made about the strength of study findings in the field. This chapter uses a deaf-centered lens to examine what constitutes evidence, how it is gained, and how this information supports academic outcomes for this population. We include examples from the literature to examine implications for research personnel, study design, and accessible dissemination, with specific attention to both study sampling and measurement considerations. Considerations for deaf-centered research criteria include (a) integrating deaf researchers and epistemologies, (b) attending to the characteristics of deaf students, and (c) acknowledgment of root causes and systems factors. The recommendations in this chapter supplement the larger ongoing dialogue regarding the cultural responsiveness and representation of marginalized populations within the education research endeavor.
Marginalized populations face systemic oppressions and multiple barriers to equitable opportunities throughout our education system. Implementing “evidence-based practices,” rooted within empirical research, is one strategy to mitigate systemic oppressions and reduce achievement gaps. Yet the evidence in evidence-based practices is not typically developed, validated, or reviewed within frameworks that are culturally responsive to diverse populations, including deaf students. 1 For example, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews evidence-based interventions for students in general education and special education; yet to date, there are no WWC guides that summarize research conducted on interventions for deaf students. While there may have been deaf students included in samples of students in special education or students with disabilities, more generally, findings regarding the impact of interventions on deaf students are not available in the WWC repository. In truth, there are more knowledge gaps than substantive areas of known causal factors for specific outcomes in deaf education research (Easterbrooks, 2017). This is due not only to the paucity of current, “gold standard” research available in the field but also to the dispersed nature of local funds of knowledge about the strategies or interventions that may have shown effectiveness with individual students in their unique learning environments (Luckner, 2017; Luckner & Handley, 2008; Trezek & Wang, 2017). The majority of research in deaf education is not replicated, nor is it generalizable to the broader deaf student population; thus, ratings of recommendations are more than likely to sit in either the moderate or the low categories of evidence within the Practice Guide rankings (and Does Not Meet Evidence according to the WWC standards), even when combined with evidence from professional practice.
This chapter uses a deaf-centered lens to examine what constitutes evidence, how it is gained, and how this information supports educational outcomes for this population, concluding with recommendations for the field. Research and evaluation in deaf education often seem to follow a standard script of deaf people as defined by hearing loss, deaf people as performing below their hearing peers, deaf people as the target for interventions to remediate the impact of hearing loss, reporting on the effect of interventions (which is typically minimal), and, finally, claims that more research is needed. The deaf person is largely invisible in this approach and exists solely as something that needs to be fixed. Nothing becomes centered on a deaf lens—in fact, one would not even need to know what deaf-centered perspectives would contribute to this rationale. While each of these steps has validity and is a necessary part of building a coherent research design, without centering the experiences of deaf people, the deaf subject is objectified, examined as an “other,” something that is either theoretically interesting or, alternatively, “an interesting point within a range of diverse perspectives.”
Prelude: Authors’ Perspectives and Context for This Chapter
This chapter is written from the specific context and vantage point of its two authors and their personal and professional experiences, both individually and in the communities in which they work. This positionality is critical not only to the viewpoints and framework presented here but also to the places and spaces where additional dialogue is needed as we continue to work with these ideas.
Stephanie Cawthon
Stephanie has more than 25 years of professional experience in education research, policy, and practice at the district, state, and national levels. Rooted in a passion for language and human development, her work has utilized the full range of research designs, including single case, quasi-experimental, phenomenological, secondary data analysis, literature synthesis, policy analysis, and more, across individual, classroom, and systems perspectives. She has written or edited three books on these topics, including the most recent co-edited volume Research in Deaf Education: Contexts, Challenges, and Considerations, a compendium on the full range of research methodologies and the need for careful consideration of the deaf context when designing and interpreting findings in deaf education research. She teaches a course on the culture of disability in education, which explores the foundational concepts of ableism, emic and etic perspectives, and intersectionality, with an eye toward how class participants can apply this information in future educational contexts.
After the initial diagnosis of prelingual hearing loss in preschool, Stephanie’s personal experience as a deaf person in education has been almost exclusively in mainstream settings, with hearing aids, preferred seating location, advanced notes, and sound amplification systems constituting the majority of accommodations during this time. Her formal academic training has been primarily in the linguistics, developmental psychology, and academic psychology fields, with informal training in and exposure to traditions such as critical theory and disability studies after the end of her doctoral training. Stephanie has had several key cross-disciplinary experiences, including graduate training as a Spencer Doctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and faculty appointments across a range of departments: Psychology, School Psychology, Human Development, Culture and Learning Sciences, and Special Education. Recent sign language acquisition has expanded the range of access strategies available to include sign language interpreters for access both in the classroom and in the broader academic workspace. There are very few faculty members with a disclosed disability working at the University of Texas at Austin and only a handful who use sign language as a mode of communication with students. Her work with the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes represented a shift toward a deaf-centered work environment and access to members of the deaf community in both professional and social contexts.
These experiences, collectively, influence her view of research evidence in education in a variety of ways. The first is that her personal experience of education has been almost exclusively rooted in a hearing and not a deaf frame. Without deaf peers and without a community that could help with navigating the hearing context from a deaf-centered approach—as well as the timing predating accommodations that are now available for deaf students under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, and amendments in 2008, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1997, amended in 2004—Stephanie’s experience is mostly one of finding strategies and persistence through contexts that usually did not recognize the need for, or could be held accountable for, accessibility. This parallels her experience with research and scholarship. Stephanie primarily charted her own path and built a research program on equity and access for deaf students from existing resources within a general educational psychology context. The majority of theories about language and learning that are found in the deaf education research literature originate in the hearing framework and are then applied to a deaf lens. This often sets up a deficit perspective about deaf people, using the hearing experience as the “normal” path and, when differences are noted, typically designating the deaf pathway and outcomes as less-than, rooted in not-hearing as the cause.
What Stephanie has grown to understand is that while there are certainly many parallels and overlaps between the two developmental pathways, there are also some critical differences, differences that are sometimes overlooked when frameworks only originate from an etic or outside perspective on the deaf experience. Most critically, systemic barriers to success often cause many of the learning and educational outcomes—barriers such as lack of access to robust language models, social isolation, siloed services and supports, negative attitudes about deaf people, and academic and employment settings that are unable or unwilling to shift toward models of greater accessibility for all participants. This foundational understanding of system factors and differential pathways is often missing from how data are collected and interpreted in the research literature. Communicating the importance of systemic factors with hearing-centered organizations that generate and use education research and, in so doing, advocating for deaf students, is a central theme in Stephanie’s professional trajectory.
Carrie Lou Garberoglio
Carrie Lou brings personal experience and professional expertise to her work, which is steeped in her lived experience as a deaf academic who grew up in the deaf community. As an early-career deaf scholar, she is part of the current movement of deaf academics who are stepping up to take the mic, demanding a seat at the table, and forging new paths through academia. In her 10 years in academia, Carrie Lou has published 25 articles, coauthored one book and coedited another, written numerous technical reports, and led efforts for making research accessible to deaf communities in American Sign Language (ASL). In her work, Carrie Lou strives to reach a more nuanced understanding of the development of deaf people throughout the life cycle, particularly in the adolescent and young-adult period, and how that development is significantly affected by psychosocial factors and systemic barriers. She seeks to provide the field with current and accurate data about deaf people that place outcome data within appropriate contexts through secondary analyses of large-scale federal data sets. She teaches statistics and research methods coursework and is committed to increasing accessibility to research for deaf communities through translating complex statistical concepts and research findings into sign language.
As a child of deaf parents who were also educators in the deaf education system, her first language was ASL, and dinner conversations revolved around teaching and school systems. Carrie Lou attended one of the largest state schools for the deaf in the nation, where she was involved in athletics, student activities, and other extracurricular programs. Carrie Lou was also mainstreamed for part of the school day from third to ninth grade, where she used ASL interpreters and navigated systems that may have been academically challenging and were not fully accessible in terms of social interactions. Her postsecondary training took her from Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people, to New College of California, a private college in San Francisco, where she designed her own undergraduate degree plan, using designated interpreters throughout the program, and Lamar University, where she studied for a master’s degree in deaf education and deaf studies with a cohort of deaf and hearing students. Carrie Lou’s doctoral studies in educational psychology brought her to The University of Texas at Austin, one of the world’s top public universities, where she focused on human development, culture, and learning science while also receiving a master’s degree in program evaluation. Throughout her educational experiences, Carrie Lou has continually shifted between understanding things in the abstract, applicable to theory and practice, and understanding things on a very personal level, applicable to her life and within her communities.
Carrie Lou’s motivation for her work in this field is deeply personal and largely driven by the desire to center deaf people in decision making that makes an impact on our everyday lives. Research and data have significant potential to affect the real lives of people, particularly people who have historically been marginalized. Her work seeks to counter commonly held narratives about deaf people that are built on a deficit perspective, by placing the onus on systems to change, not people. After all, it is not deaf people but systems that are operating at deficits.
A Deaf-Centered Approach
This chapter explores how evidence is defined in education research as it applies to interventions and services to support deaf students. Integral to this examination of how evidence is defined is the historical absence of a deaf-centered approach to research and practice with deaf populations. A deaf-centered approach is situated in a sociocultural perspective, one that is rooted in and informed by the experience of deaf people (Holcomb & Smith, 2018; Leigh, 2009). Deaf epistemologies seek to acknowledge the historical, cultural, and development contexts, to name a few, that shape and influence the design, implementation, and interpretation of data (e.g., P. C. Hauser et al., 2010; Holcomb & Smith, 2018; Paul & Moores, 2012; O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017). Deaf-centered research focuses on deafness as a “way of being” (Ladd, 2003), not a medical condition that focuses solely on level of hearing. It seeks to counter what is often an audist, hearing-centered narrative in education research, one that is rooted in biases against deaf people (Bauman, 2004; Humphries, 1975). Audism—or the preferential treatment, behavior, and attitudes toward hearing and speaking—is a prevalent and stigmatizing experience for deaf youth and adults, including deaf education researchers (Kurz et al., 2016). The subconscious bias against different modes of communication or use of assistive or alternative technologies serves as a daily reminder and obstacle to deaf people as they navigate their personal and professional worlds.
Deaf-centered approaches have applications in a broad range of fields, from architecture to health care to community engagement (Bauman & Murray, 2014; Leigh & O’Brien, 2019, Listman et al., 2011). While this chapter will be framed within a deaf-centered lens, it is important to recognize the fallacy of focusing on deafness as a singular identity. Further expansion of thinking on deaf-centered epistemologies, bringing in critical race theories as well as socio-constructivism, can be found in work that examines the complexity of multiple identities within deaf communities, including intergroup diversity and intersectional experiences (e.g., García-Fernández, 2014; Moges, 2020). Understanding and advocating for deaf-centered education research is a matter of social justice and equity for deaf students (O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017). The goal of this chapter is to highlight issues that if addressed can reduce the extent to which audist education research perpetuates systemic barriers and oppression for deaf people (Humphries et al., 2016; Humphries et al., 2019). Furthermore, it seeks to highlight areas where deaf-centered approaches can be a constructive part of a broader dialogue on how to support equitable and culturally relevant education research as a whole (e.g., Bal & Trainor, 2016). Deaf people represent an important reference point for larger conversations around contexts, historical factors, and nuances that are often overlooked when considering answers to “what works” in educational interventions.
Systems Factors
On the whole, educational approaches for deaf students have not supported their academic success (Garberoglio et al., 2019; Johnson, 1989). Unfortunately, this reality has added to the narrative that deafness is the cause of poor academic outcomes, not the failure of inaccessible education systems. Much of education research and policy has adopted this lens of individual-level gaps and deficiencies, not systems-level challenges (O’Connor & Fernandez, 2006). Discussions surrounding academic outcomes for deaf students have long focused on the chronic gaps in reading, mathematics, and high school graduation rates between deaf individuals and their hearing peers (e.g., Garberoglio et al., 2019; Mitchell, 2017). In secondary settings, deaf students consistently underperform their hearing peers on standardized measures of academic achievement (Mitchell, 2017), take less rigorous coursework (Nagle et al., 2016), and complete high school at lower rates (Garberoglio et al., 2019). These achievement gaps are also visible in postsecondary settings: Deaf students enroll in developmental coursework to a significant extent (Garberoglio et al., 2019; Newman et al., 2011) and complete postsecondary degrees and certifications at lower rates than their hearing peers (Garberoglio et al., 2019). The education and employment gaps are even greater for deaf women, deaf people of color, deaf people with disabilities, and deaf women of color. The stark achievement gaps in educational settings have real-life implications over the course of deaf people’s lives: Underemployment, economic inequities, and lower levels of well-being are recurring concerns within deaf communities (Chapman & Dammeyer, 2017; Garberoglio et al., 2019; M. L. Hall et al., 2017; Stapleton, 2017). One of the key elements of deaf-centered research is a deep understanding of the contextual factors that affect the lived experiences of deaf people—including demographic characteristics, language and communication, and educational policy. Deaf people do not exist in a vacuum. Education research must recognize how to place all research involving deaf people within the appropriate context.
Demographic Context
An understanding of the prevalence of deafness and the demographics of deaf communities allows us to further contextualize what we know about research in deaf education and about deaf people. Deaf students represent a very small percentage of the overall student population, roughly 1%, although estimates vary depending on the definition of hearing loss, eligibility for services, whether “deaf” is a primary or secondary disability category, education level, and so forth (Erickson et al., 2017, U.S. Department of Education, 2019). The low-incidence nature of this population has direct implications on research design. Researchers and practitioners must be familiar not only with working with low-incidence populations but also with the particular heterogeneity of this population, including the multitude of co-occurring disabilities in deaf communities. Unlike the general population of disabled students in the United States, among whom only 2% have multiple disabilities, around 40% to 50% of deaf students have additional disabilities (U.S. Department of Education, 2019). The higher incidence of co-occurring disabilities in deaf populations has causes that can be traced not only to medical conditions that affect hearing but also to etiologies that are related to social and systemic conditions, including limited access to language and communication, social isolation, lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate screening measures to effectively identify disabilities in a timely manner, and so forth.
Sampling for research in education, outside of a randomized control trial, is often a matter of convenience to the researcher or research team. While this option may make for efficient data collection, there are some significant implications for research design when considering that convenience sampling will be significantly affected by the characteristics of the context from which students are sampled. Deaf students’ school placement is not merely a matter of geography but is significantly affected by many potentially confounding factors. Convenience sampling often chooses to draw from schools and programs for the deaf, where deaf students are congregated together and receive specialized programming and often have the opportunity to receive direct instruction without accommodations. The first implication of this approach is that students who attend school with other deaf students are in the minority relative to the overall deaf population (Mitchell, 2017). They have exposure to deaf peers and access to services that may not be possible for a student who is served in the general education setting, even with an itinerant teacher. The second implication is that there are many family and systemic factors that influence access to and decision making regarding enrollment at a regional program or school for the deaf, factors that are likely to also affect both the demographics and the inferences made about educational outcomes of deaf students (Cawthon, 2007).
Language and Communication Context
The above findings represent some of the indicators, and not the cause, of educational disparities among deaf communities. The historical and systemic causes of achievement gaps between deaf and hearing people are many and deep (S. W. Cawthon & Garberoglio, 2017). Language deprivation (M. L. Hall et al., 2019; W. C. Hall, 2017) and the related inaccessibility of educational systems, social isolation, and low expectations for success are all intertwined and result in compounding the negative impact on educational outcomes for deaf people (Humphries et al., 2019). Lack of access to language is embedded in the historical context of education for deaf people (Baynton, 1996). Historically, many of the conversations surrounding efficacy in education for deaf students have centered on the debate around communication modality, typically characterized as a forced choice between teaching deaf students a visual language modality, such as ASL, and focusing on oral modality, including amplification of residual hearing and training in speech production (for further insights on this discussion, please refer to Baynton, 1996; Lane, 1992).
Historians of deaf studies and deaf education often refer to the devastating ramifications of the second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, held in Milan in 1880, where sign language was banned from educational settings in preference for oral education for deaf students. This decision contributed to the systematic exclusion of deaf professionals from deaf education, set up tensions between oral schools and sign schools as a dichotomous comparison in how deaf children learn, and served as a critical flash point for later advocacy for the rights of deaf people and for ASL as a “real” language (Gallaudet, 1881). The pendulum between the poles of oral and sign languages in deaf education has continued to swing over the decades. Deaf education and communication modalities used by deaf people have also been influenced by the advent of cochlear implants and improved technology for hearing aids; the move toward educating students in their local schools and away from residential education settings; the increase in the value of cultural diversity and the recognition of Deaf culture and norms; innovations in technology such as streaming video, speech-to-text apps, and instant-messaging platforms; and a growing cultural acceptance of sign language and deaf people within popular media, to name a few.
Yet this dichotomy between oral and sign languages is often a false one and leads to invalid inferences and conclusions about their roles in educational outcomes. The communication choices that deaf people make in their real, everyday lives are vastly more complex and nuanced than a binary perspective of oral versus signed languages. Deaf people rely on a variety of tools and strategies for communicating (Deluca et al., 2008; Wheeler et al., 2007) that are dependent on many factors, including availability of the language modality, accessibility of the communicative environment, amplification options and the reliability of these options, fatigue levels, personal biases, and perceived priorities of the communicative situation. An individual’s use of and preference for different language modalities may also change over time or, indeed, even within the course of a single day. This perspective of language usage as being fluid aligns with the dynamic and multidimensional definition of “deaf” introduced earlier in this chapter.
Educational Policy Context
An analysis of research and evaluation within the field of deaf education must also examine how educational policy has affected deaf education throughout history. Recent educational policies, at least those enacted in the past 40 years, are rooted in civil rights and social justice movements. Formal policy changes that guard against systemic discrimination and pay attention to the accessibility of learning environments for people with disabilities (e.g., ADA and IDEA, as well as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) have been the foundation for calls for equitable access to education and learning opportunities, as well as the workplace and beyond. Twinned with the accountability-based reforms layered onto the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), most notably the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) and its successors, including the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, educational policy now embeds policies designed to support equal access to those that define, measure, and track educational outcomes more broadly (Cawthon, 2004, 2007). The past several decades have brought hard-fought gains in public (e.g., tax payer–supported entities) responsibility to support and reduce barriers for deaf people. Deaf people (and quite often their families) have advocated for their rights under the protections of these laws and policies.
And yet the relationship between deaf people and educational policies that seek to provide greater opportunities and access is complex and often fraught with conflicting aims. Although well intended, there are many limitations in how these policies have been implemented for deaf students, limitations that have sometimes had unintended negative consequences for their development. For example, the move toward inclusive education settings, more broadly, has also led to deaf students facing more isolation and the lack of a peer group. Because deaf students are often a low-incidence population within any school or district, it is rare for naturally occurring groups of same-age peers to be available for communication access and social engagement. Although this is most salient for students who use sign language, students who use assistive technology such as hearing aids or cochlear implants also experience social isolation and challenges in interacting within the often fast-paced dynamic of a speech-based learning environment, which may not optimize the use of multisensory, multimodal means of communication and information sharing. Broad policies that prioritize inclusion with hearing peers in a regular education classroom, sometimes without communication supports, which can lead to the detriment of a student’s learning and social-emotional experience, have led to cases where students have been placed in what is thought to be a Least Restrictive Environment under IDEA but not necessarily, at the same time, leading to the goal of equal access to a Free and Appropriate Public Education. Parents and educators are thus forced to work through added layers of challenges to support deaf students and design an environment that is both mindful of the goals of IDEA and reflective of the deaf experience. This is just one of many examples of blanket application of policy without consideration of how differential impact can work against supporting positive educational outcomes for deaf people.
Defining Deaf-Centered Research
The above systems factors represent a larger landscape of assumptions about deaf people that creates barriers to building an accurate evidence base in deaf education research. When considering the question of what constitutes evidence-based practices and why, there is great value in studying a range of populations with varying demographics and historical contexts. From an empirical research design perspective, the low-incidence and heterogeneous nature of this population is typically viewed as a challenge in making strong inferences about the efficacy of interventions and their components. However, rather than a detriment to being able to draw causal inferences, we argue that this diversity is a value when critically looking at how standardized approaches to program implementation, not to mention large-scale research designs, yield relevant and applicable information for researchers and practitioners alike.
The next section seeks to put forward definitions of deaf-centered research that are rooted in standards for rigorous research and the context of research with deaf people. There are many methodological issues in the corpus of deaf education to date that limit our capacity to move forward with effective interventions and supports for deaf students. Quality deaf-centered research is not simply an application of standards for research with a new population. Systemic biases and audist perspectives are observable across all phases of the research process, from the foundational assumptions to the types of instruments used to collect the data from which inferences are made about deaf people. To highlight both the macro and micro lenses that deaf-centered research dialogue entails, this section explores what deaf-centered research looks like (and does not look like), both in overall study design and specifically within a measurement perspective.
Deaf-Centered Design
The starting point in all research work is often defining (a) the intervention, targeted outcomes, and question of interest and (b) the population(s) that is (are) the focus of the study. Foundational decisions regarding these two research components then flow through to the types of data that are collected, who is included (and excluded), and what inferences are made about the findings. For the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on intervention studies, or initiatives that seek to understand the effects of an instructional approach on learning outcomes for deaf students. In a typical group design, intervention studies may focus on those students who receive the intervention or treatment versus those participating in a “business as usual” control. The selection of the intervention and the outcome of interest is critical to the value of the results in improving education for deaf students.
Consider the following examples of the complicated relationship between theoretical assumptions and research design and the potential negative impact of conclusions on the lives of deaf children. The Geers et al. (2017) study of the results of sign language exposure on language development in children with cochlear implants and the response from M. L. Hall et al. (2019) are an example of a published dialogue that illustrates how these long standing-issues in the field are interwoven into discussions regarding research design and the resultant conclusions regarding study findings. The Geers et al. (2017) study examined the effects of varying degrees of sign language input on later spoken language development and reading skills in children when implanted before they are three years old. The results of their analysis, among others, indicated that children whose parents reported long-term exposure to sign language at home had lower scores on speech and spoken language skills than children whose parents reported using only speech at home. The Geers et al. (2017) study and M. L. Hall et al. (2019) response are situated within the tension between whether children exposed to sign language experience delay in spoken language and the importance of exposure to an accessible language early in development, which for many deaf children is a visual language modality.
M. L. Hall et al. (2019) root their critique of Geers et al. (2017) in the need to recognize the long-term impact of language deprivation in deaf children and in research findings that can perpetuate conditions that put deaf children at risk. At a foundational level, one persistent misperception is that deaf people with cochlear implants are no longer deaf, when in fact cochlear implants do not create access to sound at the same level as that of a hearing person (e.g., Niparko et al., 2010). Even children who have mild to moderate levels of hearing loss can experience significant developmental delays without proper language and social supports (Antia, 2002). A second significant concern is that the research questions in the Geers et al. (2017) study set up the assumption that spoken language is valued over all other outcomes, including language development more generally, including sign language. Sign language development was not included as an outcome in this study, limiting the conclusions that can be drawn about language proficiency, not just spoken English. Third, the way in which sign language exposure was included as an external variable was problematic both in definition and in nonrandom assignment to the condition. The definition of “manual communication” in this study design did not focus on a full natural language such as ASL but, rather, a broad range of various sign systems, some that are natural languages and some that are not. There was no indication of the quality of sign language use, only a rough estimate of the quantity. Without a more precise measurement of sign language exposure and use, as well as control over those conditions when setting up comparison groups, the methodological concerns significantly undermine the strength of the study conclusions. Also of note is the fact that the Geers et al. (2017) study sample was skewed heavily toward children with earlier age of implantation, from white families, and with mothers with a higher education level, characteristics that raise significant questions as to the generalizability of these findings to the broader deaf population (Mitchell, 2017).
A reality not limited to but often quite applicable to the study of research interventions for deaf students is the complexity and variability of their demographic characteristics. One frequent approach in defining demographics in a group-based design, in particular, is to eliminate additional variables that may serve as confounds, including additional disabilities. Unfortunately, that approach in deaf education research leads to a significant underrepresentation of students who, in some cases, represent the majority of deaf students in a school or program. While special issues on deafdisabled populations do illustrate the complexities and important educational issues that need to be addressed (e.g., the special issue of American Annals of the Deaf edited by Guardino & Cannon, 2015), leaving these students out of research designs and studies of educational interventions means that, in many cases, generalization is limited to what is a very small subset of the overall deaf student population.
One of the most critical issues here is the selection of comparison groups in a study. Often deaf people are compared with hearing people as the primary reference group, instead of examining the variation within the deaf population and factors that may support positive developmental outcomes. While there are some developmental experiences that apply to all students, regardless of background, setting research questions up to compare deaf students with hearing students represents, at best, a simplistic view of the differences between these two groups. What is often at play is an implicit bias toward hearing students’ experience as a “normal,” “average,” or “expected” outcome. Group designs that perpetuate the thinking that a deaf experience and a hearing experience differ only on the basis of hearing level do a disservice to the goal of deaf education research, which is to identify and address systemic inequities that are the root causes of the gaps between deaf students and their hearing peers.
Deaf-Centered Measurement
Measure development and selection are a critical component of a high-quality research design. When thinking about valid measurement within the context of this discussion of building evidence within deaf education research, there are some key considerations that affect study design. Because there are very few validated measures for use with deaf populations, researchers in deaf education are typically left with one of three options: (1) use measures designed for a general population and propose possible limitations as a caution for inferences made; (2) tweak the original measures and adapt wording, context, and language delivery, and provide accommodations; or (3) develop new measures and validate with a deaf sample, which is often a significant research project in and of itself.
The first issue to understand is that measures designed for general populations may not be a good fit for use with deaf populations (Cornes et al., 2006). In some cases, there are implicit biases within already validated research measures that may serve as a confound to accurate measurement with deaf populations. For example, a survey item may refer to auditory or spoken-language communication experiences as the foundation for the question, adding additional cognitive load in what needs to be considered in a response from deaf test takers, who may not have full access or experiences in that domain. Sometimes the research stimuli themselves are auditorily based, such as a video to watch and respond to, and if captions are not included, they may not be accessible to deaf test takers. In other cases, the measures are primarily available in written or spoken English. Access to sound aside, English language development in deaf students, particularly the academic English that is often used in education research, may be delayed due to early language deprivation and reduced access to high-quality instruction (Mitchell, 2017). Measures that are at an advanced grade level in academic English, especially at the secondary grade level, may not be accessible for some deaf participants.
This lack of validated measures can be a challenge for researchers working to capture the experiences of deaf people. On the flip side of biases in measures designed for a general population is the idea that there are deaf-centered experiences that may be relevant to the construct at hand. This consideration of deaf-centered measurement goes beyond providing captions or even a sign language version of a standardized measure. In a deaf-centered measure development process, the key constructs are considered with the added consideration of the deaf experience.
For example, Cawthon et al. (in press) examined a broader concept of accessibility in higher education from a deaf perspective. The team reviewed previous frameworks (e.g., Universal Design for Learning), guidelines based on ADA, and previous measures of access on campus for students with disabilities. The team also reviewed the literature for those factors that are barriers to and those that are positive predictors of enrollment, retention, and graduation for deaf students in postsecondary settings (Cawthon et al., 2014; Rose et al., 2006). The final framework emphasized not just one domain, accommodations in formal learning experiences, but multiple domains, including campus technology and emergency response systems, attitudes of faculty and staff toward deaf students and equity, infrastructure to support accommodations implementation, and access to the social networks that are so often a part of the informal but essential components of participating in the larger campus community. The team then conducted cognitive labs with deaf students who are currently at a university and have previous experience asking for accommodations. Including the perspectives of the target population is a recommended practice to adequately respond to questions of construct equivalence across cultures (Byrne et al., 2009). The goal was to walk through the draft survey items and determine whether these specifically targeted postsecondary deaf individuals’ experiences and if the respondents explicitly understood the content. Cognitive lab participants were shown the items and asked (a) What do you think this item is asking? (b) How would you answer this item? (c) Are the items clear? (d) Are we missing anything? Open discussion was encouraged, and items were revised based on the feedback. With this approach, the measure of campus access had deaf-specific concerns, and opportunities and contexts were embedded within the overall construct definition and within the items themselves. This is similar to a community-participatory approach to research and evidence building, a practice that has already been emphasized as a strategy to minimize testing bias for deaf individuals (Graybill et al., 2010; Roberts et al., 2015).
Creating accessible measures for deaf people often includes a consideration of sign language versions of assessments, even if used in conjunction with written versions of the measure (Cawthon, 2009). Quality measure translation from one language to another is not simply a matter of a word-for-word conversion of a test item; rather, it is also a conceptual and cultural translation. Multicultural testing translations often involve modifications or adaptations, including leaving out specific items that are deemed culturally irrelevant or biased, repeating or simplifying instructions, and administering tests without time constraints. In the case of a translation to a visual language, practical implications for item delivery, layout, and data collection also require consideration and integration into the research design (Henner et al., 2017).
Recent work in the area has sought to build a repertoire of knowledge on best practices in measure translation and delivery (e.g., Cawthon, 2011; Hansen et al., 2018; Henner et al., 2017; Higgins, 2003, Kushalnagar et al., 2017; Roberts et al., 2015). A common theme across this body of work is the need to consider how the deaf experience may lend itself to different framings and contexts on how language, culture, and communication interact to reflect a unique set of experiences that are typically not captured in measures designed for and by hearing people. For example, Kushalnagar’s body of work expands the National Institutes of Health–funded Health Information National Trends Survey to be inclusive of deaf individuals who use ASL. A simple example of adjusting items for cultural relevance is provided in Kushalnagar et al. (2019): In a question about engagement on the internet, they give “posting a vlog (posting a video in ASL)” as an example in the prompt of how the person engages with social media content. Cultural and linguistic adaptation is not limited to providing videos in ASL. The authors of this chapter have worked with a team to translate the Self Determination Inventory, a measure of self-determination for deaf youth, one that is not only translated into ASL but is also reflective of the broader experiences of this population. For example, background questions about communication, education, and family interaction include both frequency and language modalities, not presuming one but allowing for all that apply to capture the range and nuance of the deaf participant’s experiences. In both cases, construct-relevant test items that are culturally relevant to deaf participants’ experiences were included in the development of the measures.
Strategies to Support Deaf-Centered Education Research
Achieving deaf-centered research is a long-term but essential process. The following strategies are offered as essential to attaining these goals not only for deaf education but for social science research with deaf populations as a whole. Some of these recommendations are reflective of continued inequities for deaf scholars, who have reduced access to the training that is needed to develop the research skills required to conduct high-quality education research, and fewer resources than are needed to engage in research. These recommendations have specific implications for the long-term development of scholars who can lead and contribute to the corpus of literature in a culturally reflective and valid manner. One critical point to make here: We propose these ideas as only a starting point for thinking about deaf-centered research. The perspectives of other deaf scholars must be considered within this dialogue, especially those who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color, deafdisabled, and/or LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual and/or Ally), such as Deaf LatCrit (García-Fernández, 2014) and Black Deaf Gain (Moges, 2020). The continued engagement of a diverse range of deaf-centered perspectives will be essential as these strategies for centering deaf people in deaf education research move forward.
Create Spaces for Deaf People to Lead Education Research
Decisions about deaf people and deaf education often fail to be informed by the experiences of deaf people (Kusters et al., 2017; Singleton et al., 2014). Deaf education research that does not include deaf people in the research process is at risk of reinforcing and extending the deficit model in which findings are often situated. Deaf epistemologies encourage examination of the barriers in and inaccessibility of the deaf child’s home or school environment as key factors in individual development. High-quality, relevant research in education requires scholars who are rigorously trained, deeply mentored, and connected to professional networks, and who have opportunities and access to funding to support their work. An emic perspective is an essential part of developing a robust set of evidence-based practices, and this requires the development and training of deaf education researchers and expansion of their work. To date, the “ivory tower” has not been largely hospitable and accessible to deaf scholars; thus, there has not been a significant change in the pipeline of professionals who have both the emic, deaf experience and the foundation needed to innovate research methods in a way that provides both sufficient evidence for causal factors and cultural relevance (Horejes, 2012; O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017).
Developing a pipeline of qualified and skilled deaf researchers begins with systems change across levels of preparation and training. Preparation for graduate school includes time in research labs as an undergraduate, close mentoring with faculty, and early experiences with writing and presentations that become the foundation of future academic work (P. Hauser, 2017). For deaf students and scholars, accommodations and services are often not available to provide an equitable experience across these diverse and complex learning contexts (Cawthon et al., 2020). Sometimes there is an outright denial of access—refusal to fund and support deaf individuals to participate in the same educational and employment and, as particularly relevant to this discussion, research experiences as their hearing peers (Palmer et al., 2019). Other times the reduced accessibility is more subtle—lack of coordination between an internship site and the university, faculty who do not caption their classroom media, assistive learning devices that break or are not maintained, or rotating interpreters who are not able to keep up with the technical terminology and conceptual understanding, which need to be built through a consistent interpreting team (D. H. Smith & Andrews, 2015). Each experience of inaccessible learning environments is cumulative, resulting in a significant psychological and emotional toll: Deaf students are often tired and demoralized, and feel unwelcome in the “social” class of academia. This can become itself a barrier, above and beyond the policies and behaviors of the institution.
The question of value is one that often arises when navigating the larger education and research contexts. Deaf scholars are often pigeonholed into teaching ASL classes or working only in deaf education teacher training programs instead of in the specialized fields in which they were trained (O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017). Deaf scholars and their allies have to consistently educate and shape the narrative so that the values and relevance of work with deaf people are seen. This takes immense effort and represents an added burden, on top of many preexisting responsibilities. The values and lessons of the deaf experience need to be fought for, including equipping and amplifying the voice of deaf scholars and identifying and encouraging allies to be a part of the solution to the problem. This makes it clear that the goal is not only to serve, support, and improve education outcomes for deaf people but that the values and ways of deaf people should serve as a model for many fields. While deaf-centered research is not the place most people go to seek out models for approaches that are effective in education interventions and systems change as a whole, raising expectations and opening mind-sets are critical for the field to represent and include the range of perspectives available to improve education practice.
Constantly fighting for basic access to information is a significant drain on personal and professional resources, leaving less time, energy, and social capital to leverage opportunities to engage in larger networks essential for promotion and influence. More complex examples may include ensuring not only that representatives from the deaf community are included in feedback about research findings but also that their experiences are prioritized in how research questions are defined, how interventions are designed, and how projects are funded and supported. Community-based participatory research offers examples of what this may look like in practice for deaf communities (e.g., Garberoglio et al., 2020). Deaf leadership in large-scale decisions that have ramifications for deaf people and their children is largely absent in today’s power structures. The slogan “Nothing about us without us” is one that needs deeper consideration throughout the education research development and vetting process.
Establish Deaf-Centered Research Criteria
There is immense value to the field of education research as a whole for deaf education research to strive—even beyond the benefits that it purports to have—to address the very real inequities in the educational outcomes of deaf people. This may require careful consideration of how current evidence-based standards in research (e.g., WWC) and special education research (e.g., Cook et al., 2015), while critically important, may be insufficient without additional considerations specific to deaf experiences. Cook et al. (2015) note the need for continued refinement of the standards for evidence-based practices and evaluation of research in special education, a sentiment that draws from the foundational work of Gersten et al. (2005), Horner et al. (2005), and Odom et al. (2005). As such, the recommendations outlined here are meant to augment, not replace, other guidelines such as those produced by the Council for Exceptional Education Evidence Based Practices Workgroup (2014) and summarized by Cook et al. (2015). We hope that these recommendations, taken together as a whole, can shape efforts to develop culturally responsive, deaf-centered research and a deeper understanding of how to create a synthesis of evidence across studies that involve deaf populations, such as reviews by the WWC and, by extension, practices that qualify as evidence based on the Every Student Succeeds Act (Midwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2018), or that are included in the Institute of Educational Sciences’ Practice Guides.
Conceptually, the recommendations here are along a similar vein as the Bal and Trainor (2016) guidelines for culturally responsive research, which also built on the existing standards for intervention research with the intent of expanding their sensitivity to the ecological contexts and systemic factors that mediate educational experiences for students from marginalized populations, particularly in the United States. Several of the criteria outlined in Bal and Trainor capture similar elements as those offered here, such as a reflective practitioner approach to the rationale for the theoretical foundation of the study and mindfulness as to how the diversity of the sample is meaningfully integrated into the analysis plan. In contrast with Bal and Trainor, the guidelines provided here are not inclusive or exclusive of any specific research design, quantitative or qualitative, but rather broader in nature. We do not make specific recommendations about the data analysis approaches or criteria for technical quality that are already offered by Bal and Trainor. When used in conjunction with culturally responsive research standards, the deaf-centered approach can provide a broader framework than existing standards for rating the quality of evidence-based practices.
This call to action for adopting a deaf-centered approach to research on deaf populations, in particular in education, extends standards from these methodological criteria to the ways in which theoretical frameworks and representation are infused into the research design and inference-making process. The recommendations below apply not only to evaluations of individual research studies but to the synthesis and determination of evidence-based practices as well. A deaf-centered approach to examining evidence in education research raises several key issues, including the following: (a) Are deaf epistemologies, and scholars, part of the foundation of the study rationale? (b) Are salient characteristics of the deaf population considered in the design of research studies? (c) Are findings interpreted within the lens of historical and social context, systems factors, and other contributors to individual outcomes? Each of these considerations is expanded on further below:
Include deaf research partners and deaf epistemologies: Research can be highly informed by learning directly from deaf people about what is effective and beneficial in their educational experiences. This may seem to be an obvious source of information, but in reality, deaf perspectives have largely been overlooked in the development of and thinking about evidence, validity, and success in educational interventions (O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017). Evidence of effectiveness has, for many years, been determined primarily by hearing professionals working with deaf populations (De Clerck, 2010). Yet deaf individuals themselves have rich and invaluable experiences (Holcomb, 2010; Kovarsky, 2008; Kusters et al., 2017) that are critical to understanding both the systemic barriers that lead to education and employment gaps as well as strategies for navigating through them (Graham & Horejes, 2017). In a sense, this call to include deaf scholars in deaf education research is an extension of what O. Robinson and Henner (2018) and McKinney (2016) refer to as cripping the academy, with a specific application of deaf people within education research. In addition to the imperative of a strong presence of deaf researchers, insight from deaf populations resides at both individual and community levels (Singleton et al., 2017)—similar to Bryk’s (2015) call for a multidisciplinary and practitioner-inclusive education research design process. Taken together, both deaf researchers and deaf members of the community can build toward research designs that are informed by deaf people and deaf communities.
Integrate the characteristics of deaf students into the study design: Research in deaf education and related fields historically underdescribes and thus underconsiders the diversity of its populations in the study design. Yet an overall increase in the amount of information available about samples of deaf students, on its own, is not the only solution to this problem. The type of information gathered and how it is used are also a critical component of understanding what interventions work for whom and how different factors may interact to influence the study results. For example, defaulting to predictive factors such as decibel loss, age of implantation of a cochlear implant, or whether or not the student is enrolled in a school for the deaf can lead to a simplistic, and artificial, categorization of deaf student characteristics and introduce hidden confounds that undermine the quality of the study (Batten et al., 2014). While it may seem clinically convenient to categorize study participants by rough categories of access to sound (e.g., mild, moderate, profound, or severe degree of hearing loss) or by whether or not the child wears a hearing aid or uses sign language, these categories do not reflect what is actually essential for all children, including deaf children: access to robust language models, to communication partners, and to quality learning environments, however those might occur (see Kushalnagar et al., 2017, for examples of changes to demographic items that reflect this shift). Furthermore, access to language, communication, and education has long-term effects on the entirety of a child’s development. The legacy of language deprivation looms large over deaf education research, as indicated by significantly higher rates of additional disabilities and mental health challenges than among hearing peers (Glickman & Hall, 2018). Without some consideration of access to language both in the early years and in later developmental periods, studies that are looking at predictors of or interventions designed to target educational outcomes will fall short of understanding how those factors may interact with or be shaped by a child’s language and resultant cognitive and socio-emotional development.
Acknowledge root causes and systems-level factors: A deaf-centered lens on this question of evidence requires that the root causes of outcomes for deaf people be acknowledged, integrated, and considered within the design and implementation of strategies to promote deaf success (S. W. Cawthon & Garberoglio, 2017). This emphasis on the legacy of systemic oppression in past and current educational attainment is at times parallel to the experience of other marginalized populations (O. E. Robinson & Henner, 2017). The urgency of research that leads to effective practices is higher for populations that have experienced systemic oppression. From a deaf perspective, we simply cannot ignore the long-term impact of language deprivation, lack of professional expertise, and inaccessible learning environments when considering the evidence for remedies to their cumulative effects (Cawthon et al., 2014; M. L. Hall et al., 2017). The value of a deaf lens is that it requires attention to many of these issues in a way that calls into question factors such as the home language environment and its relationship with emerging English literacy skills, or access to incidental learning that provides world knowledge and context critical to learning abstract concepts. While mainline research may gently acknowledge these factors but then continue without serious consideration to them, research with the deaf community cannot make meaningful inferences without including them in an intentional way. The level of rigor required for this body of research to pursue “truth” and “what works” within a complex and historically oppressed context can be a model for the field of education research as a whole. While determinations of what constitutes evidence-based practices rarely look beyond metrics such as research design, effect size, and statistical significance, these recommendations challenge the field to also incorporate the cultural context in the interpretation of the meaning of study results.
From an educational policy perspective, IDEA is explicit in its emphasis on individualized plans that are tailored to the learning goals for each student. As with any educational intervention in special education, there are significant questions of fit between the design of the curriculum, strategy, or program and the individual student. Supports that are advantageous to one student may not be so for another; there may even be detrimental effects of a particular practice across different student groups. In the context of this discussion, the reasons for language and literacy delays may be significantly different enough for deaf students from those for their hearing peers to require a different approach or intervention strategy, even for the same targeted skills. Interventions may need to be designed differently, or adapted, to reflect both what we know about development (e.g., the qualitative similarity hypothesis for literacy development, Paul & Lee, 2010, which highlights how literacy development is similar for deaf and hearing readers) as well as the trajectories that may require additional support, such as the cumulative effect of language deprivation on mental health outcomes (Glickman & Hall, 2018). Heterogeneity in both the population being served and the sampling within and across validation studies is thus a critical component of how well an evidence-based practice meets industry standards.
Conclusion
Any discussion of evidence about “what works” in deaf education without a deaf-centered lens is not only likely to be inaccurate or incomplete but is also unethical. There has been immeasurable harm done to the deaf community by well-meaning researchers who operate outside of a deaf-centered outlook (Humphries et al., 2016). Interventions that are designed based on a deficit model of deafness rooted in audism, even when cloaked with a “helper” mentality, reinforce what has been centuries of oppression of deaf people and their perspectives. But perhaps the most important aspect of a deaf-centered framework is that it is not just inclusive of deaf perspectives but begins with them in mind. The deaf lens and viewpoint are not only represented in but are the starting point for the research design and consideration of what research questions are important, how data are collected, and what defines effectiveness and success.
Inference making and social implications are really at the heart of validity (Messick, 1989), which is central to how research is presented, translated, and messaged to a general audience. Far from a qualitative versus quantitative divide, these questions examine the quality of the inquiry and understand the reality that human behavior, in all situations, is rooted in a social fabric that must be recognized, even if its measurement is elusive. Without this, education research becomes reductionistic, at best, and unable to reach its potential to effect the systems change that is needed to eliminate the factors that contribute to achievement gaps for deaf students.
This proposed deaf-centered approach to evidence-based practices has many practical ramifications in research design (S. Cawthon & Garberoglio, 2017), but it also has a philosophical one. Who gains from the knowledge and research in deaf education? Is it deaf children and their families? Education research itself is an enormous industry, one that draws from ever-decreasing resources of funding and research faculty. In the quest to provide a robust foundation for educational interventions to eliminate education gaps for deaf students, a deaf-centered lens requires that the framework, design, and inferences made are done by and with deaf people for deaf people. Although there has been progress in identifying the need for culturally responsive and guided research in deaf education, there are still significant gaps between what a deaf-centered lens conveys and what is currently put into practice. There are very few studies that incorporate the strengths of deaf students, such as resilience in navigating what are often inaccessible education systems, or the deaf community, such as sharing social capital and providing role models for future success (S. W. Cawthon & Garberoglio, 2017). Deaf-centered research, supported by the academy and its funders, can help create a body of research that values and supports the full experience of deaf people, both in formal education and in their life-long pursuits.