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Presented to ICCHP 2000. International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special needs.        
Karlsruhe (Germany) 17-21 July 2000.            
http://szswww.ira.uka.de/icchp2000/wgs.htm

Multimedia based instruction of reading comprehension for deaf people: Experimental results

Alcantud F., Asensi M.C., Ferrer A.M., Romero R.
Research Unit Acceso http://acceso.uv.es

Dpto. Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación

Universitat de València Estudi General (Spain)

SIMICOLE (Multimedia System for Reading Comprehension Instruction) is a computer program to train reading comprehension skills in adult deaf people. We present in this paper the results obtained by a sample of four prelingual deaf users working with SIMICOLE. Oral language user seem to benefit more from the program. Proper user autoregulation and learning strategies also influence positively in the results.

1. Introduction

Reading is a very important mean for deaf people to access information. However, prelingual deaf people have many difficulties to learn the oral language. Their lack of audition complicates their speech perception and impedes them to progress correctly in words and linguistic structures. This clearly diminished competence in oral language leads to very poor reading performance [3][8]. In fact, most of these people do not acquire a functional reading level, meaning by that the reading competence of an 11-12 years schoolchild. For example, Furth research [6] show that only 8% of US deaf population reaches a reading level higher than the one of 10 years old hearing schoolchildren.

Therefore, adult deaf people promotion and their incorporation to higher and professional education implies necessarily to offer these people reading comprehension training systems with the goal of improving their reading skills and hence facilitate their access to written information so widely used in these educational environments. Acquiring a good reading competence becomes a must to successfully perform in higher education programs.

From this perspective our research group at the University of Valencia developed SIMICOLE, a program for training in reading comprehension of adult deaf people wishing to enter university.

2. SIMICOLE overview

SIMICOLE is a program for reading skills training and improvement in adult deaf people which is based in Gardner apprenticeship model [7]. Its design is based in three main axes: user characteristics, the instructional model and the technological model [2].

Several principles of instructional design and interface design of educational software have been taken into consideration in the development of the application and the definition of its interaction with the student. For example, the sequence of contents is structured according to the principles of increasing complexity, increasing diversity and the training of globally relevant skills. There are three consecutive levels of difficulty in the program with a total of 2,200 exercises related to 62 texts.

SIMICOLE works around a set of 134 operational objectives, which are grouped into 19 general objectives based on a previous study [1]. The general objectives are in turn grouped into 3 main instructional areas, namely Morphological-Syntactical, Lexical-Semantical and Pragmatical.

The sign language, more familiar to some deaf users, is used as an scaffolding system along the course to assure that new concepts (words and expressions) are correctly comprehended. The sign language video clips are used intensively at the beginning of the program and then diminish progressively its presence. However, the course can also be completed without any sign language knowledge.

Figure 1. Vocabulary screen.

The program consists on two modules: Student and Tutor. In the Student module  we can find:

(1)    Content presentation (Contenidos): The course has a selection of texts extracted from real-life written contexts: newspaper articles, fiction and essay books, educational texts... For each text the student can see an image, an introductory text with sign language alternative, the text itself and a selection of vocabulary with text and sign language definitions.

(2)    Off-line exercises (Ejercicios): Each text has an average of 40 related exercises. The student has to do them all sequentially. Immediate feedback is given to the student about the result of each exercise. There are different formal types of exercises: choosing the right alternative (figure 2), associating lists of elements and typing the right word in a form field. The student can go to the content area and return to the exercises as often as needed.

(3)    On-line Production Exercises: at the end of the set of off-line exercises the student can connect to Internet by clicking a button on the screen to do two more exercises that will be sent automatically to the tutor for its correction. The first exercise is to write a summary of the text. The second exercise is an inference question about the text. The exercises are sent by the web form to the tutor e-mail.

(4)    Results (Resultados): in this screen the student can see his/her results in the exercises done so far for the current text, and both the cumulative and detailed results of the previous texts exercises.

The Tutor module allows the tutor to navigate through the contents of the course (texts and exercises) without having to follow the order defined in the original sequence. There are also some options regarding the management of students. This allows the tutor to change the password, current level, current text or current exercise of any student, should it be necessary. The most important option is the possibility for the tutor of revising the student logs and statistics: the tutor has access to the log file generated by the program, in which all the student actions are recorded sequentially and he/she can see many reports about the student progression. These are the reports available: results cumulated by general objectives and main instructional areas, evolution of results for each text and instructional area, vocabulary terms consulted in each text and time used in each of the program sections for each text.

Figure 2. Exercises screen.

3. Experimental study

3.1. User group

There were two groups of users. Firstly 5 adult users, older than 25 and wishing to enter university. Secondly 10 secondary education students (teenagers) who undertook the program to increase their perfomance at college. From the whole sample we present here a set of four users results. Users A and C from first group and B and D from second group. C and D are oral language users and A and B are sign language users. Users A and B completed the three program levels while C and D only did the two first ones.

3.2. Methodology

1.- A previous evaluation is done considering the following:

-         Information collection about each user hearing loss, formative development and main communication mean (oral or sign language).

-         First reading comprehension evaluation (pre-test) using Pérez González test [9] and ECL II [5]. Vocabulary competence is also measured with Peabody Image Vocabulary test and intelectual competence with a TONI II test [4], which is a test with no verbal load.

2.- Users attend a first session for a general explanation of the program to follow, including a description of SIMICOLE objectives, the application interface, functions, how to log in and so on.

3.- The course tutor completes a whole text in SIMICOLE for the users. It is a model session of what they will have to do on their own during the training program.

4.- From then onwards, users autoregulate their work sessions in the computer room where SIMICOLE is installed, with the support of one person for any technical problem that may appear.

5.- After completing second or third program level, depending on cases, reading comprehension level is measured again using the same tests already done in the pre-test. We call this the post-test and it was always done at least three months later than the pre-test, thus eliminating any possible “test learning” effect in the results.

3.3. Case characterization

The four users present deep prelingual congenital deafness. See next table for concrete data:

Table 1. Case description

3.4. Results

These are the data registered automatically by SIMICOLE for each user and level completed:

·        Average (Mx) and standard deviation (Sx) of percentage of correct exercises per text in level. Table 2.

·        VC: average percentage of vocabulary terms consulted per text in the level. Table 3.

·        CT: average number of text consults during exercise work in the level. Table 3.

·        TL: average time (minutes) for reading and consulting each text in the level. Table 3.

·        TE: average time (minutes) per exercise in the level. Table 3.

	Case A			Case B			Case C		Case D
Level	I	II	III	I	II	III	I	II	I	II
Mx %	57,25	64,66	62,12	59,53	60,18	47,89	86,55	84,46	63,51	52,98
Sx	15,43	9,31	12,67	14,09	11,15	14,86	6,14	8,59	13,55	15,94

Table 2

Figure 3. Graphical representation of table 2 Mx data

Best program performance in levels I and II are obtained by oral language users (C and D). The decrease in D performance for level II could be explained by having consulted less the vocabulary during that level, probably for being less motivated that at the beginning of the program.

Regarding each case progression (Mx result), they all show similar performance in the 3 (or 2) levels. It must be consider however that each program level is more difficult than the previous one, and hence the possible reading competence improvement could be offset by the higher text complexity in that level.

	Case A			Case B			Case C		Case D
Levels	I	II	III	I	II	III	I	II	I	II
VC %	60	14,9	80	16,4	11,5	10,4	65	88	60	14,9
CT	16,55	30,05	36,12	13,95	12,10	4,39	7,27	6,14	16,55	30,05
TL min	12,64	34,05	56,41	15,46	10,24	12,66	7,32	11,21	8,87	7,64
TE min	0,96	1,42	1,89	0,62	0,50	0,51	0,66	0,66	0,96	1,42

Table 3.

Adult people, A and C, show less variation in Mx. They both seem to show better auto-regulation and learning capability as they increase reading time TL with the level (as texts are more difficult) and increase or at least maintain time per exercise TE along the program from one level to next. Users A and C also have perform vocabulary consults (VC). On the contrary, the teenage users, B and D, do not follow these learning strategies. Student D even performs worse than expected according to her higher than her mate IQ and vocabulary level.

Pre-test and post-test are more adequate to evaluate the effectiveness of the system as a training program as the texts considered present identical difficulty level. Here it can be seen that oral language users (C and D) get a significant improvement while no improvement effect can be clearly shown in sign language users (A and B).

Table 4.

4. Conclusions

The growing text complexity along the program levels mean that we must use external text of equivalent difficulty as indicators of the reading comprehension improvement in the users.

Users more familiar with oral language benefit more from the program as shown in the progression from pre-test to post-test results, although this that not mean that they perform better in the program itself. This factor is much more important than the rest, including non-verbal intelligence. In fact the best progression is obtained by the person with least IQ and vocabulary competence.

New technology offer many benefits when applied to psychoeducational process interventions as it allows to register many data exhaustively about the user performance. However in an instruction process like this the learning style variables and in general the user autoregulation are of paramount importance. For this reason, although SIMICOLE is basically a self-learning application it is essential the attentive presence of the tutor to provide adequate feedback for the student progression.

5. Acknowledgements

This research and previous SIMICOLE development was carried out during the project ACCESO25 of the ESF Horizon Initiative with the co-financing of Universitat de València Estudi General.

6. References

[1] ALCANTUD F. VIDAL-ABARCA E.GILABERT R. (1988) Un sistema de instrucción en comprensión lectora para los alumnos del ciclo medio de EGB. Valencia: Universitat de València. Servei de Publicacions.

[2] ALCANTUD, F.; ASENSI, Mª C.; FERRER, A. Y ROMERO, R. (2000) Sistema Multimedia De Instrucción De La Compresión Lectora: Un Programa Para Mejorar La Habilidad En Personas Sordas Adultas. Valencia: Universitat de València. Servei de Publicacions.

[3] ASENSIO, M.; CARRETERO, M. (1990) Los Procesos de Lectura e los Niños Sordos”, Anuario Español e Iberoamericano de Investigación en Educación Especial. Madrid. CEPE.

[4] BROWN,L.; SHERBENOU, R.J.; JOHNSEN, S.K. (1995) TONI II Test de Inteligencia no Verbal. Madrid: Ediciones TEA.

[5] DE LA CRUZ, M.V. (1997) ECL II. Evaluación de la Comprensión Lectora. Ediciones TEA.

[6] FURTH, H. G.(1966) A Comparison of Reading Test Norms of Deaf and Hearing Children. American Annals of the Deaf, 111, 461 y ss.

[7] GARDNER, H. (1991) The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. New York: Basic Books.

[8] MARCHESI, A. (1987): El Desarrollo Cognitivo y Lingüístico de los Niños Sordos.  Madrid Alianza Psicología.

[9] PÉREZ GONZÁLEZ, J. (1978) Pruebas para Evaluar la Lectura. Vida Escolar, 197-198, Marzo-Abril, 53 y ss.