It is widely accepted that assessment plays a role in monitoring the development of young children with special needs in early intervention/early childhood settings. The process of assessing young children's language skills often looks for delays within a solid language foundation. However, many children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may not have a solid language foundation to assess, leading to inaccurate assessment. When we reframe how we assess language skills in children who are DHH, we ensure the assessment provides a comprehensive picture of the child's language development. It is important to modify language assessment tools where necessary while ensuring the assessment stays reliable and valid. It is critical to use multiple assessment tools to monitor the child's progress, including standardized assessments and assessment tools normed for DHH populations. Finally, it is crucial to monitor the child's skills in each language that they are using, regardless of which language is used most often. We explain why each of these factors needs to be considered in the assessment of young children who are DHH, will discuss the challenges of assessing this population, and will provide solutions to some of the challenges of assessing language skills in of young children who are DHH. K E Y W O R D S assessment, deaf, language
Deaf children use their eyes to acquire information about their world. They do not naturally acquire this skill; rather, it is learned behavior that usually happens early in their development. This paper discusses the different attention strategies deaf children learn in preschools, such as maintaining eye gaze, and participating in joint attention. While attention strategies may be implicit, there is a need for explicit instruction for children to understand the importance of visual attention for academic and social development.
The positionality of any researcher influences the data collection of their research directly or indirectly, which in turn has an impact on the research being conducted. This chapter discusses the importance of reflecting on one’s own insider and outsider positionality and how they contribute to the study design, research measures, and dynamics of the research team. Positionality and intersectional perspectives are also examined as important elements of the research. Using examples from international research experiences, this chapter offers examples of how positionality concerns arose in our research. Finally, this chapter outlines different approaches and solutions that our research team used to address the complexities that arose surrounding positionalities, which become possible strategies for any researcher wanting to study deaf education.
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