Reasoning Skills: A Key to Literacy for Deaf Learners

Until the latter part of the 1960s, many educators viewed literacy as a set of competencies that could be mastered through a series of discrete and in some cases "lower level" skills such as identification, recognition, memory, and repetition. Such a view equated literacy with only the decoding aspect of learning to read and ignored writing and mathematical reasoning, as well as attention to meaning. Many laypersons shared this view, but happily not all educators did; it was the teacher guides written for a number of reading textbooks that first truly introduced to teachers the term and meaning of metacognition, when other disciplines neither named this area nor included it in instruction. For the most part, however, the exciting changes in the development of cognitive psychology up through the 1960s focused on disciplines other than literacy; for example, cognitive psychologists played a major role in the curriculum revolution projects in science, social studies, and mathematics but were not overtly involved in any relationship with the world of acquiring literacy. Only since that time have there been movements to create a confluence between literacy and reasoning.