Cognition, Education, and Deafness: Directions for Research and Instruction

Reactions from the Researcher's Point of View

Reactions from the Researcher's Point of View Donald F. Moores The perspective I would like to give is not that of a basic researcher or a researcher who is interested in deafness from an experimental viewpoint. Rather, it is the perspective of an educator of the deaf who happens to be doing research. I came into the field of education of the deaf as a trained behavioristic psychologist. As a behaviorist, my perspective was that speech and language (by which I meant English) and cognition (or intellectual functioning) were all the same; the implication was that one develops a child's speech, language, or intellectual functioning simply by manipulating contingencies of reinforcement. I was disabused of this idea very quickly when I became a football coach in a high school for the deaf. I found that quality of speech, English skills, and cognitive functioning were not necessarily consistent for any particular child. In other words, I found all combinations and I realized how incredibly difficult it is to really synthesize in a field such as ours. It is clear that the environment of a deaf individual is different from that of a hearing individual. The interaction of a deaf individual with other deaf people as opposed to hearing people also is different. It is clear that the social cognitive demands placed on deaf individuals differ in quantity and quality from the demands placed on hearing individuals. However, what comes across to me, and apparently to most of the people who have written papers for this volume, is the essentially normal functioning of deaf people in our society. My own experience as a teacher at the elementary, high school, and college levels and from postgraduate research I have done shows continuously that deaf people function in a normal way. Research that I have been involved in with deaf children, deaf adult workers, and regular classroom teachers having deaf children in their classes consistently supports the idea that deaf children and adults are able to meet the conceptual demands of our society. In many cases we find that deaf people are rated as being superior to hearing students or hearing workers in their environment, probably because deaf people are academically underemployed and underplaced. The problems that come up again and again deal with communication and not with basic conceptual abilities. Results of research on intelligence tests and on cognitive functioning, which I treat separately, indicate that deaf individuals are able to function at abstract levels as well as anybody else. Unfortunately, in our society and in every other industrial society, the deaf have been a relatively powerless group. Deaf people do not develop our cognitive tests; they do not develop our IQ tests; they do not set up our experiments. These tests have been made, administered, and interpreted by hearing people. 224 Even at the international symposium upon which this volume is based, where there was a liberal and open acceptance of deafness, only 1 of the 40 or so writers in the several theme areas was deaf. In this' volume, I write as a hearing person telling the reader about cognition and deafness. We should keep in mind that whether or not I have empathy for deafness, I have not lived through the environment that a deaf person experiences. My first reaction to the content of the papers in this volume is similar to Sigel and Brinker's call for a clear definition of cognition. I found the content was much broader than I had anticipated, especially in the areas of reading and language. I felt that many of the papers could have been written for a conference on reading and/or language. I was also curious as to whether or not the deficiency model would come across very strongly in this collection of papers. In our field, we tend to have cycles dealing with issues such as speech, language, American Sign Language , cognition, etc. For example, some linguists have spent the first 10 or 15 years of their careers trying to prove that sign languages are essentially the same as spoken languages; they then turn around and concentrate on the differences between sign language and spoken language. The same thing happens when we talk about cognition. There are differences between deaf and hearing people, of course, but the question is whether these differences are really essential. There were some surprising omissions among these papers. First, there was little reference to Ottem's (1980) review of literature that appeared in...