The Effectiveness of Hearing-Impaired Teachers' Judgment Of Relative Text Difficulty for Deaf Students

This study examined variables that hearing-impaired teachers of hearing-impaired students use to judge text difficulty for their students and evaluated the effectiveness of that judgment. The 107 hearing-impaired teachers who participated in the study ranked four narrative passages whose difficulty levels had been predetermined by (a) readability formulas and (b) hearing-impaired students' comprehension test performance. Teachers also listed variables they believed accounted for the difficulty of the passage they determined to be most difficult. Findings revealed fairly good correspondence between teacher judgment of text difficulty and students' performance on the comprehension measures. Variables identified as influencing text difficulty included vocabulary, sentence complexity, complexity of plot/story line, and number of characters and characters' names. Implications of these findings are discussed.