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

A Synthesis from Beyond the Field of Deafness

A Synthesis from Beyond the Field of Deafness Irving E. Sigel Richard P. Brinker The issues and questions raised by the papers in this volume indicate that a strong and viable research effort is being made to come to terms with the many perplexing and complex questions facing investigators who are studying cognition and cognitive development in deaf learners. This research will serve as a basis for developing educational programs that will meet the needs of these children in the coming decades. From our perspective, the goal of the International Symposium on Cognition, Education, and Deafness can be specifically stated as follows: How can deaf students be educated so that they can take their rightful place as autonomous self-directed individuals in both hearing and nonhearing worlds? A related question seems to be implicit in the foregoing: How can these children be educated so that they can bridge the gap between the world of the deaf and the world of the hearing? As we analyzed all papers, we shaped our discussion to take account of the diversity of interests, research models, and opinions regarding what should and should not be done. As researchers from outside the field of deafness, our perspective is limited to this particular group of papers; we are not so presumptuous as to present ourselves as experts in the field of deaf cognition and education. We come from a background of developmental psychology and mental retardation research, respectively. However, we shall use as our data base the papers written for this volume, as well as the comments made by their authors in the various sessions of the symposium. We have organized our points into six topic areas: l. Theories and models of cognition and education. 2. Types of studies reported. 3. Epistemological differences among the research designs. 4. Gaps in the research on cognition, education, and deafness. 5. Future research directions that flow out of the discussions. 6. Social-political issues that seem to be implicit and explicit. Before attending to each of these topics, we would like to address a problem we found with the key concepts that are the focus of this book: cognition and deafness. In all of the discussions we found little effort to define explicitly either the continuum of deafness or cognition. The reason for raising these two issues at the outset is because this omission posed a problem for us in organizing this synthesis. We had to create our own framework, which is expressed in the foregoing categories. But it is noteworthy that we did not discover an explicit model for a psychology of deafness. The prevalent approach observed in the papers was a more gen209 A Synthesis: Cognition, Education, and Deafness eral model of human development that applies to deaf children as well as to hearing children. We shall have more to say about this later in the context of particular topics. As for the definition of cognition, we shall address this point in particular, but in general it posed a problem for us since cognition is a central theme of the papers. Without an overall clarification, we are left with the feeling that the definitions of each concept vary considerably among investigators. If this variety is the case, then the various papers addressing cognitive issues may in fact not be addressing the same problems . This point is critical because until we have a common understanding of just what it is we are talking about, w~ may neither hear nor be heard by one another. With this introduction let us proceed directly to the specific topics. Theories and Models of Cognition and Education The papers in this volume reflect two theoretical orientations toward cognition (Piagetian and information-processing) and two theoretical orientations toward education (Ausubellian and Feuersteinian). None of these theoretical orientations can be offered as competing alternatives because they were not developed to explain the same phenomena. Piagetian theory offers both a description and an explanation of how certain types of knowledge develop from infancy to adulthood. Information-processing approaches, on the other hand, analyze knowledge acquisition into several component processes , such as attention, perception, representation, memory, and problem solving. While the information-processing approach is now clearly an ascendant psychological paradigm, it is limited in its capacity to systematically study knowledge acquisition in the home and school contexts where it usually occurs. Ausubel's theory considers how the content of systematized knowledge in academic curricula should be presented in the process of education so that the structure of...