Book Assists Students With Hearing Loss

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Most new college students find higher education much more difficult and demanding than their high school classes were, and for hard of hearing and deaf students the challenges can be magnified significantly.

An estimated one in 10 college students nationwide suffers hearing loss. In addition to providing services to these students, colleges and universities must know how to identify students who may need help but are reluctant to ask for it.

Two University of Arkansas professors, Douglas Watson and John Schroedel, served as lead editors for a new guidebook published for colleges, universities and other service providers. Watson directs the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center for Persons Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, which was established in 1982 in Little Rock. The center is based in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

“This publication is expected to result in increased access to postsecondary education for students who are deaf,” Watson said. “We also anticipate that it will increase resources for professionals serving this population, increase use of technology for training activities and student access and increase collaboration among state, regional and national groups.”

Hard of hearing all his life, Watson has worked in the field of deafness rehabilitation for 43 years. He has written or edited 25 books or monographs as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles.

John Schroedel, deaf since his early teens, has worked as a research professor at the center from 1983 until his retirement in December 2006. One of the nation’s leading researchers in the field of postsecondary education and career training for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, Schroedel authored the first and second chapters, drawing extensively from research conducted at the Little Rock center.

The new book, Hard of Hearing Students in Postsecondary Settings: A Guide for Service Providers published in May by the University of Tennessee Center on Deafness, includes numerous citations to related research by Watson and Schroedel and other members of the center’s staff who also assisted in editing the book. It can be accessed online at http://prcorder.csun.edu/media/1219hh-students/index.html.

The University of Arkansas Rehabilitation Research and Training Center for Persons Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing established a national task force two years ago that was co-sponsored by the Postsecondary Education Programs Network-South center at the University of Tennessee. The Tennessee program is an affiliate of the national PEPNet group, which is a collaboration of four regional centers that are funded by U.S. Department of Education grants to assist the nation’s educational institutions in more effectively addressing the postsecondary, vocational, technical, continuing education and adult education needs of individuals who are hard of hearing or deaf.

The publication will be free and downloadable from the PEPNet Web site. The reader will be able to open individual sections or open the entire document to print. PEPNet is mandated to serve all 50 states and their postsecondary education and training programs, estimated at more than 3,000 programs.

In addition, the book is being distributed worldwide by the Postsecondary Education Network-International, an international partnership of colleges and universities serving the higher education needs of students with hearing impairment. It was founded in 2001 by the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the Tsukuba University of Technology in Japan. PEN-International is funded by grants from the Nippon Foundation of Japan.

While the book is intended primarily for service providers at the postsecondary level, the information and resources included will also be helpful to students and parents as they discuss plans for education. Teachers, transition specialists and related staff of secondary programs can also use the book as a tool when working with students as they move from secondary to postsecondary education and training programs.

With the advances in technology, students have many more choices than ever, but individual differences still play an important role in how well the student understands the information presented, according to the book’s introduction by Marcia Kolvitz, director of the PEPNet-South center at the University of Tennessee. An accommodation that works well for a lecture may not be effective in a laboratory, meaning flexibility and creativity are essential components to providing an accessible environment.

The authors also point out that, not only the cause of a person’s hearing loss, but also the timing of when a person suffers hearing loss makes a difference in psychological, social and communication needs. People who are deaf from an early age learn sign language, acquire deaf peers and develop a self-identity as well their own unique lingual community and cultural values. Comparable coping mechanisms are usually not available for late-deafened or hard of hearing students. University officials may have to overcome resistance on the student’s part in order to be of assistance, and the book offers insight on doing that.

The book addresses allocation of resources to meet the challenge of better identifying and serving hard of hearing and deaf students, provides assessments of how friendly a college is to students with disabilities and dispels myths that can hinder effective delivery of services. One such myth assumes that people with hearing losses know what their educational- and employment-related problems are, but in reality many are isolated from other people with similar problems and tend to minimize or even deny their hearing disability.

It also provides extensive information about assistive listening devices, an example of a communication questionnaire and contact information for numerous resources.