Energy and the Environment: An Approach to Teaching Modeling That Breaks the Hearing-Impaired Student's "Limits to Growth"

Hearing-impaired students generally have problems in courses that are highly language dependent and which involve abstract conceptualization. The course, "Energy and the Environment," at the Rochester Institute of Technology is such a course.

One specifically difficult area of instruction for hearing-impaired students is the interrelated nature of the important variables concerning energy and environment. For example, to make decisions about appropriate national decisions, one must weigh at least the years of available resources left, the amount of pollution being produced, the industrial output per capita, the amount of arable land, the total energy requirements, the food consumed per capita, the birth rate, the death rate, and the total population.

Students do not usually understand these relationships. They tend, for example, to feel that one can make arbitrary rules on the amount of pollution that can be emitted without recognizing the effect such rules would have on industrial output or on the energy requirements. From another perspective, students feel that increasing industrial output is necessary for a growing economy (in which they too want jobs) and that we must not restrict energy consumption if it hinders new jobs.

There are, of course, many other considerations. Instead of arguing the concepts, a model was developed using the variables mentioned above. Because the model is programmed for an Apple II computer, students can actually make entries in the classroom and get immediate feedback on the validity of their assumptions. Probably the best aspect of this program is the opportunity it provides to teach students about concepts of modeling, the strengths and the weaknesses of modeling techniques, and the usefulness of computer literacy. Foremost among the benefits is the opportunity hearing-impaired students have to work with normal hearing students in study groups to make their assumptions. Because they work in small groups, both kinds of students learn the strengths and weaknesses of the other population of learners.

An unanticipated benefit of the microcomputer has been the challenge given to students to build better models. On their own, students have extended the program used in class to include their own ideas about modeling and of uses of graphics.