Applied deaf aesthetics toward transforming deaf higher education.
Joanne Weber, Denyse Hayward, Michael Skyer and 1 others
PMID 39565282WHAT IT FOUND
A deafblind student and some hearing students in a small deaf-education case study reported favorably on enlarged, simple online slides with sign language and captions.
It cannot show these changes improve learning.
Key findings
01One deafblind student strongly agreed with 10 of the 13 Likert items about the reformatted materials.
02The deafblind student reported that equal on-screen sign language and spoken language meant she did not have to resize or move windows, which reduced cognitive load.
03Responses showed both agreement and disagreement between the deafblind student and nondeaf students about the reformatted materials.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included one deafblind student and 21 volunteers from a class of 116, so it cannot generalise. The course materials were changed in several ways at once, so the contribution of any single component cannot be separated. The main outcomes were student-reported Likert responses and interview comments, not measured communication or learning outcomes. The authors were also course designers, instructor, or student. This overlap may affect interpretation. The paper is about higher education curriculum, not a clinical therapy intervention.
Declared interests
The paper reports funding from the Government of Canada to the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta. It does not report other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the favorable student responses as evidence that this curriculum design improves learning for deaf or hearing students. It was a small case study, and several design changes were made together.