Teachers' Ratings of the Communication Abilities of Their Deaf Students

In this study, teachers' ratings of the speech intelligibility and receptive communication ability of 15 severely deaf and 15 profoundly deaf students using five methods of communication were compared with the students' scores on tests of these receptive communication methods. The teachers' ratings generally were lower than the test scores, and examination of the correspondence between ratings and test measures revealed a low level of association between the two. Only the correlation between ratings and test results for fingerspelling had an acceptable level of statistical significance. Teachers' ratings appeared to underestimate students' tested communicative abilities in all communication modes, a situation that could engender self-fulfilling prophecies of poor performance. It would therefore be useful to have relatively quick, reliable, valid procedures available for teachers to assess their students' communication competencies with the various manual and oral components of communication. Several such procedures are suggested.