Successes and Challenges in Teaching Chemistry to Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

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.

Exclusion Reloaded: The Chronicles of Covid-19 on Students with Disabilities in a South African Open Distance Learning Context

“…The above comments are a reiteration of the sentiments shared earlier by Lynn et al [35] that special considerations such as the implementation of inclusion of access services like interpreters and captionists in certain circumstances are necessary. The above views, though, also add to the growing concern reported worldwide that current online learning platforms in response to Covid-19 are not sufficient for inclusive education in favour of SwDs [40,41,43,44]…”

“…While it may be expected by some ODL institutions to swiftly transit to full online learning as compelled by the emergence of the virus, developing and delivering online learning materials that are engaging has been a global challenge. Special considerations are needed especially in activities such as laboratory activities which need to approximate a hands-on experience, making it even an extremely difficult task for those catering for SwDs as these may, at the very least, necessitate implementation of inclusion of access services like interpreters and captionists [35]. Adding to the above challenges, lack of capacity by lecturers to support SwDs in terms of developing and delivering inclusive online learning materials is also reported [33].…”

Using online information technology for deaf students during COVID-19: A closer look from experience

“… Dochy et al., 1999 ). Deaf students have different communication preferences and diverse tactics to conduct academic work ( Lynn et al., 2020 ). In our case, the type and structure of the offered assessment methods did not change with the migration to online distance learning.…”

“…There can be no “one-size-fits-all” solution to all challenges and for all students; however, some techniques will help to support the unique needs of deaf students. Informal chat and more substantive peer-to-peer contact prior to class should be included in classes with deaf students ( Lynn et al., 2020 ). Actually, this will promote learning during class and will enhance communication with their peers, the teacher and the interpreter.…”

COVID-19 and the abrupt shift to remote learning: Impact on grades and perceived learning for undergraduate biology students

“…The categories of interest for this study are gender, race/ethnicity, and two proxies for socioeconomic status (college generation status and federal Pell grant eligibility). The transition away from an in-person lecture and having to adapt to a large change mid-semester could also have negatively affected the learning of students with disabilities [7] as changing learning environments have presented novel challenges for deaf and hard of hearing students [58] and students with disabilities more broadly [7]. However, because we are using institutional data in these analyses and data on disabilities is protected by federal law, we were not able to examine the impact of the transition on students with disabilities in this study, nor were we able to explore other identities not routinely collected by the university registrar.…”