The switch to distance learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has required chemistry instructors to quickly adapt and innovate to provide remote instruction as effectively as possible. With minimal advance notice, developing and delivering online lecture materials that are engaging and laboratory activities that approximate a hands-on experience has certainly been an all-around challenge. Creating content that ensures the inclusion and success of all students, including those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH), requires a great deal of consideration to be effective under any circumstances. To be sure, mainstream courses that are inclusive of D/HH learners necessitate, at the very least, the successful inclusion of access services (interpreters and captionists). However, in these abnormal times, an online instructional environment that accommodates D/HH students’ preferences and abilities and that is attentive to the unique social and emotional challenges that many of these students are experiencing must be established. Our campus provides both direct instruction and mainstream instructional environments for D/HH students, giving us unique perspectives on how to instruct and support students with the pandemic-forced switch to online learning. With this communication, we endeavor to share these observations and experiences with other chemistry faculty so that they may support D/HH students in their own classrooms and laboratories.
A common problem encountered by a teacher who is working with hearing-impaired students on vocabulary development is a seemingly continuous inclass confusion over the specific term which is being discussed at any given moment. After significant experimentation with a variety of media forms, a system has been developed for the purpose of providing instructional support for the learning of medical terminology at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Slides and flashcards have been produced to assist with inclass activities and out-of-class study of approximately 4,000 medical word elements (prefixes, roots, suffixes), terms, and abbreviations. Each slide and card contains a term, diacritical marks, definition, and body system symbol. Slides are produced using a two-color split frame method with the term and diacritical marks on top in red and the definition and body system symbol on the bottom in blue. Slides are used with a random access projector and a red/blue/ clear filter wheel, allowing for immediate visual display of term only, definition only, or both. Each student is provided with a set of flashcards, produced from the same art work as the slides, with the definition printed on the back of each card. The use of these materials has increased student comprehension scores while simultaneously decreasing student learning time. It is proposed that this process might be successfully employed to assist in the learning of vocabulary in other technical areas.
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