Educating Deaf Children Language Cognition and Learning

Deafness & Education International
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Educating Deaf Children: Language, Cognition, and

Learning
Marc Marschark & Harry Knoors
To cite this article: Marc Marschark & Harry Knoors (2012) Educating Deaf Children:
Language, Cognition, and Learning, Deafness & Education International, 14:3, 136-160, DOI:
10.1179/1557069X12Y.0000000010
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Published online: 18 Jul 2013.
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deafness & education international, Vol. 14 No. 3, September, 2012, 136–160
Educating Deaf Children: Language,

Cognition, and Learning
Marc Marschark
Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Edinburgh, UK
Harry Knoors
Royal Dutch Kentalis and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Decades of research have demonstrated that deaf children generally lag

behind hearing peers in terms of academic achievement, and that lags in
some areas may never be overcome fully. Hundreds of research and interven-
tion studies have been aimed at improving the situation, but they have
resulted in only limited progress. This paper examines cognitive functioning
among deaf learners, describing and integrating research that indicates
them to differ significantly from hearing learners in ways likely to affect learn-
ing. Findings demonstrating that deaf and hearing children differ in domains
such as visual-spatial processing, memory, and executive functioning provide
directions for both future research and practice. First, however, teachers and
other professionals need to recognize that deaf children are not simply
hearing children who cannot hear. Only then can teaching methods and
materials fully accommodate their strengths and needs.
keywords deaf education, memory, visuospatial processing, metacognition,

executive functioning, knowledge organization
School placement for deaf children ranges from specialized schools for the deaf,
through special units or classrooms in regular schools, to full inclusion through
co-enrolment programmes or individual placement. Regardless of where a deaf
child is enrolled, parents and educators have to consider the language(s) of instruc-
tion and the extent to which various support services can be offered within the
classroom or are better provided on a ‘pull-out’ basis. Frequently overlooked,
however, are issues associated with differences in cognitive functioning between
deaf children and their hearing classmates. It is these issues that we address in
this paper. In discussing them, ‘deaf’ is used to refer to any degree of hearing
© W.S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012 DOI 10.1179/1557069X12Y.0000000010

CHALLENGES OF INCLUSION 137
loss sufficient to affect communication and learning. Although this is frequently

thought of as moderate hearing losses of 40 dB or greater, reviews by Goldberg
and Richburg (2004) and Moeller et al. (2007) have shown that even children
who have a mild (losses less than 40 dB) or a minimal hearing loss (less than 25
dB) face significant difficulties in communication, learning, and social develop-
ment. These children may be particularly at risk in regular classrooms, where
their good speech might lead teachers to assume that they have equally good
hearing. Unless specifically noted otherwise, our use of the term ‘deaf children’
therefore should be understood in broad terms, and ‘deaf education’ to the teach-
ing and learning of a very diverse population.
Given these definitions, most educators, researchers, and deaf people would
agree that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to deaf education is inappropriate, and a
broad range of alternative placements is necessary in order to accommodate the
wide individual differences among deaf children. In fact, one-size fits-none. At
the same time, economic pressures, parent preferences, and a notable lack of
evidence-based decision-making has led to a marked increase in the frequency of
deaf children being educated in regular classrooms, with greater or lesser attention
paid to the possibility of academic strengths and needs distinct from those of
hearing classmates. While we fully understand the desire of parents to have their
deaf children educated with and ‘to be like’ hearing children, we neither believe
that mainstreaming is necessarily the best alternative for all deaf children nor, in
contrast to frequent administrative assumptions, is it always the least expensive
or most appropriate from a social perspective. This does not mean that a
separate placement is always the better alternative. Given the huge variation in
academic achievement among deaf students, we believe that pedagogical and
didactic factors – knowing how to teach deaf students – may be far more important
than where the teaching takes place (Knoors & Hermans, 2010; Abbate &
Marschark, 2011; Marschark & Hauser, 2012). This review therefore focuses
on what we know and what we need to know if we are to educate deaf children
effectively, whether in regular or in special classrooms.
Of particular interest to both of the authors, in their research as well as in their
involvement in the education of deaf students, is the issue of cognitive functioning.
Those most interested in issues surrounding deaf education frequently assume that
except for differences in hearing and the primary modality of language use, deaf
and hearing children are just the same. In education, this leads to the assumption
that if we remove communication barriers in the classroom through sign language,
cochlear implants (CIs), or other means, deaf and hearing children should learn the
same material at much the same rate in the same ways. Recently, however, our own
work and that of other investigators have convinced us that this is not the case. The
heterogeneity among deaf children is such that this cannot be a universal statement.
Nevertheless, there are significant cognitive differences between deaf and hearing
children that must be considered in choosing educational placements and teaching
techniques.
138 MARC MARSCHARK AND HARRY KNOORS
Cognitive issues in the teaching and learning of deaf children

By age 3, most deaf children are lagging behind hearing peers in language develop-
ment. Although studies of cognitive development in deaf preschoolers are relatively
rare, it is also at this point that we also would expect to begin seeing cognitive diver-
gence between deaf and hearing learners (Marschark & Hauser, 2012). The extent
to which those observed differences are a function of language, environmental cir-
cumstances, or other factors is still a matter of investigation as well as some philo-
sophical debate. But, while it would be convenient to say ‘it does not really matter,
we simply have to address the symptoms’, life is not quite that simple. Teachers can
address some of the differences observed between deaf and hearing children in the
classroom. The goal, however, should be to provide deaf children with the cognitive
foundations they need for learning, not just remediation of perhaps superficial
behavioural/knowledge differences after they are already lagging in school.
In addition to the individual differences observed among hearing children, deaf
children also will be affected by factors directly related to their hearing losses (e.g.
aetiologies of those losses, less access to auditory information in the environment)
and other factors indirectly related to their hearing losses (e.g. a higher probability
of impoverished language environments, different parent–child interaction patterns,
educational histories in less than ideal settings). Thus, while deaf and hearing chil-
dren may be cognitively similar in more ways than they are different, deaf children
are far more variable than their hearing peers. Regardless of its origins, this variabil-
ity is reflected in scores on intelligence tests (Maller & Braden, 2011) as well as in
academic outcomes (Knoors & Marschark, 2012; Qi & Mitchell, 2012). Deaf chil-
dren are also more likely than hearing children to have multiple learning challenges,
originating in the causes of their deafness. Those children may require educational
accommodations beyond the cognitive issues discussed here, but their needs vary
so widely that there is little research that allows us to draw any general conclusions
(but see van Dijk et al., 2010; Knoors & Vervloed, 2011). This situation is regret-
table, because those children typically will be the ones in need of the greatest
support. And, they will pose a tremendous challenge for all teachers, but even
more so to teachers in general education in those countries were inclusive education
for these children with multiple disabilities is advocated.
Evaluating cognitive potential among deaf children

Historical assumptions aside, differences between deaf and hearing children need
not indicate deficiencies. As we will see later, deaf students have strengths in some
areas that might be used in accommodating their needs. Such differences, together
with the large individual differences noted earlier, make an assessment of deaf chil-
dren’s intellectual and cognitive potential considerably more difficult than is the case
for hearing children. In part, this is because most tests developed to measure intelli-
gence are intended for individuals who depend on hearing for most of their learning.
The language in which the test is administered – spoken language or sign language –
can either put deaf children at a disadvantage or give them an unfair advantage (in
the case of sign language). Thus, just as assessments developed in one country may
not be ‘culture fair’ in another, deaf children’s different knowledge (e.g. about
sounds and speech as well as people’s reactions to them) create difficulties for
interpretation as well as administration. So, it is important not to assume that a
‘fair’ assessment necessarily will or should yield the same results for deaf and
hearing children (Maller & Braden, 2011, for discussion).
The assumption of equal intellectual potential for deaf and hearing children comes
from the finding that the average non-verbal intelligence scores of deaf students do
not differ significantly from the scores of hearing students, at least when those with
multiple disabilities are excluded (Maller & Braden, 1993, 2011; see below). But
non-verbal intelligence does not exhaustively cover the range of abilities needed
for the classroom learning (e.g. Akamatsu et al., 2008); language, whatever its
form, is central to virtually all facets of human endeavour. At the same time, it is dif-
ficult to know how to interpret findings indicating that deaf children score lower
than hearing children on tests of verbal intelligence (Maller & Braden, 1993).1 Aka-
matsu et al. (2008) argued that while the delays in language development exhibited
by most deaf children make such tests suspect, they still can be useful. For example,
the variability observed among deaf children on verbal intelligence tests can reveal
relative strengths or weaknesses in language more generally. Verbal intelligence
scores also generally are a better predictor of academic performance than non-verbal
scores and therefore can provide helpful information for making placement and pro-
gramming decisions (Gibbs, 1989; Akamatsu et al., 2008). Such interpretations need
to be made with great care, however, because of the possibility that tests of verbal
abilities are measuring something different in deaf children than in hearing children.
The same might be said of non-verbal intelligence tests, although there do not appear
to be any empirical investigations of the issue (but see Bettger et al., 1997).
Although non-verbal tests generally are assumed to yield comparable scores for
deaf and hearing people (e.g. Braden, 1984; Maller & Braden, 1993), results actu-
ally have been quite variable (see Maller & Braden, 2011, for a review). It remains
unclear as to whether such variability is the result of sampling, problems of admin-
istration, underlying cognitive differences, or as yet undetermined differences among
deaf individuals or between them and hearing individuals. All of these may be
involved. We will discuss below, for example, that deaf individuals may score
higher than hearing individuals on visuospatial tasks and on some elements of intel-
ligence tests that require visuospatial memory or manipulation (Braden et al., 1994).
In contrast, they tend to perform more poorly than hearing individuals on tasks
requiring sequential memory and therefore often score lower on tests of memory
span for both verbal and non-verbal materials (Todman & Seedhouse, 1994;
Fagan et al., 2007).
1
Importantly, ‘verbal’ here and elsewhere refers to the use of language, not necessarily spoken language (which is ‘vocal’).
Are deaf children more likely to be ‘Visual Learners’?

It is often assumed that blind people hear better than sighted people or that deaf
people see better than hearing people, what is commonly referred to as sensory
compensation. At least in the case of deaf individuals, there is no generalized
enhancement of vision, visual perception, or visuospatial processing skills relative
to hearing individuals (Marschark & Wauters, 2011). Depending on the specific
visuospatial task involved, they may perform better, worse, or the same as
hearing individuals. For example, deaf adults who use sign language show
relatively better performance relative to both hearing individuals and deaf individ-
uals who use spoken language in their ability to rapidly shift visual attention
(Rettenback et al., 1999) and detect motion in the visual periphery (Loke &
Song, 1991). Dye et al. (2008) noted that deaf individuals show greater attention
at peripheral locations, while hearing individuals focus more on the centre of the
visual field. This enhanced peripheral attention does not occur in hearing people
who are native signers, so it is not the use of a visual-spatial language per se
that changes the attentional system. However, Green and Bavelier (2006) have
shown that frequent playing of action video games can enhance visual attention
skills to levels comparable to those seen among deaf signers. The point, therefore,
is that deaf children’s brains develop in a context in which they have to devote
more attention than hearing children to the visual environment in order to
know what is happening, and their brains therefore have more capacity devoted
to peripheral vision than hearing individuals (Neville & Lawson, 1987; Proksch
& Bavelier, 2002). With regard to learning, the fact that deaf individuals may
have greater sensitivity to the visual periphery does not mean that what they
‘see’ there is processed sufficiently for information to be extracted. Sensitivity to
peripheral visual stimuli can offer deaf children advantages in allowing them to
become aware of events that other children notice through hearing, but it also
may lead to greater distractibility in visually noisy environments like the classroom
(Dye et al., 2008).
Beyond visual sensitivity to change, performance of deaf children on tests of sus-
tained visual attention generally is usually worse than that of hearing children (e.g.
Quittner et al., 1994). In practical terms, Matthews and Reich (1993) examined
communication in classes at a school for the deaf, a setting in which one would
expect people to be sensitive to visual communication needs. They found that
when students were signing, their peers were looking at them only about 30 per
cent of the time. When teachers were signing to the class, students looked at
them an average of only 44 per cent of the time, only slightly less than when
they were the target of a teacher’s production (50 per cent). Matthews and
Reich argued that the lack of effective visual communication in the classroom
might account for part of deaf students’ relatively poor academic performance.
In a more fine-grained analysis, Marschark et al. (2005a) examined deaf students’
allocation of visual attention in mainstream classrooms that included an instructor,
an interpreter, and a visual display (i.e. requiring either constant shifting of visual
attention or a broader attentional field). Deaf students who grew up signing and
those who grew up with spoken language showed the same patterns of visual atten-
tion and comparable levels of comprehension, despite assumptions from the per-
ipheral vision studies that the skilled deaf signers would have an advantage.
Such findings contrast with assumptions made on the basis of visual detection
studies, but are consistent with those from investigations of mother–child inter-
action indicating that deaf mothers do not sign to their young deaf children
unless there is eye contact (Waxman & Spencer, 1997; Meadow-Orlans et al.,
2004).
Deaf individuals who use sign language have been shown to have some visuos-
patial advantages relative to hearing individuals, such as increased face discrimi-
nation abilities (Bellugi et al., 1990) and mental manipulation ability (Talbot &
Haude, 1993; Emmorey, 2002). Bettger et al. (1997), however, showed that such
abilities take time to develop. Face discrimination among deaf children of
hearing parents (aged 6–9 years) was actually somewhat lower than that of
hearing children with hearing parents. By adulthood, deaf individuals perform
equally well regardless of parental hearing status, presumably the result of
visual experience and related neurological rewiring (Green & Bavelier, 2006).
The only facial features that affect such discrimination, however, apparently are
those associated with sign language, again reflecting an interaction of language
and cognition.
Finally, despite claims about the visuospatial advantages of deaf learners, depend-
ing solely on vision clearly would have drawbacks. Information presented verbally
to deaf students in an instructional situation, regardless of whether it is through
spoken language or sign language, must be paced to allow learners time to look
away from the speaker/signer to attend to any visual aids that are presented as sup-
porting information (e.g. slides or computer screens). In most cases, this necessitates
teachers’ progressing more slowly through a given amount of information than in a
situation with only hearing students. In the regular school classroom, teachers may
not be willing or able to remember to take that extra time, something we have
observed with both deaf and hearing teachers. If they do take the additional time,
less information may be covered than would be the case in the classroom with
only hearing students. In either case, deaf students will be at a disadvantage.
Without other strategies or opportunities that compensate for this situation (e.g. stu-
dents receiving one-on-one tutoring at other times), there is no obvious solution to
this dilemma. Even if deaf students are provided with the time to attend alternately
to the teacher/interpreter and related visual materials, they will have to depend more
on working memory and be less likely to engage in relational processing compared
to hearing students (see below) who can look at a visual display while the instructor
speaks about it. The latter situation is well known to result in better learning (Paivio,
1971; Mayer & Morena, 1998), and we therefore now consider memory and related
processes involved in learning.
Memory and learning

In this section, we consider ways in which learning might be affected by memory
differences between deaf and hearing students, relating to both working memory
(or short-term memory) and semantic memory (or long-term memory). Consistent
with psychological treatments of these areas, the issue is not only how well different
kinds of materials are remembered, but ways in which working memory and seman-
tic memory interact with incoming to-be-learned information.
Working memory and learning

Studies dating back to at least the late 1800s (e.g. Mott, 1899) demonstrate that deaf
individuals, on average, remember less than hearing individuals do in a variety of
memory tasks. This difference is particularly marked in memory for sequentially
presented verbal or non-verbal materials that have to be remembered in order.
Such findings were once thought to indicate intellectual deficits in deaf people,
but recent studies have indicated that qualitative and quantitative aspects of
memory among deaf individuals are more related to their primary language
modality than to their hearing status (Hall & Bavelier, 2010). With regard to
language modality and memory, research has demonstrated that deaf individuals
with strong phonological and speech skills tend to use phonological or temporal
coding strategies particularly suited to sequential memory tasks. Accordingly, they
have larger memory spans (Pintner & Patterson, 1917; Lichtenstein, 1998). Those
individuals who primarily utilize sign language are more likely to use visuospatial
coding strategies. These are less appropriate for retaining sequences but more effec-
tive for remembering locations in space. Todman and colleagues (Todman &
Cowdy, 1993; Todman & Seedhouse, 1994) thus found that deaf children had
better memory than hearing children for complex visual figures, but the advantage
disappeared when parts making up the figures had to be remembered in sequence.
Hall and Bavelier (2010) found that visuospatial memory was as good as or
better in deaf signers than in hearing speakers, leading them to conclude that sequen-
tial memory tasks are inherently biased against deaf signers. They did not conclude
that visuospatial tasks are inherently biased against hearing speakers, but argued
that intelligence tests and related instruments should utilize different kinds of
working memory tasks for deaf and hearing individuals.
Another aspect of memory that has been found to differ between deaf and hearing
learners is the relative automaticity with which they use contextual information
available in working memory and related knowledge retrieved from long-term
memory. Deaf students frequently are observed not to utilize knowledge we know
they have in problem-solving tasks where it would be useful (e.g. Marschark & Ever-
hart, 1999). Similarly, they often do not relate or integrate individual pieces of infor-
mation to form concepts and identify relationships when reading (e.g. Banks et al.,
1990; Marschark et al., 1993) or solving mathematics problems (Ansell & Pagliaro,
2006; Blatto-Vallee et al., 2007). Marschark and Wauters (2011) noted that this
relative lack of automatic relational processing is consistent with similar findings

from a variety of memory and problem-solving studies and may represent a
general information-processing style characteristic of deaf students – one that can
have specific effects on learning. In an extensive review, Ottem (1980) found that
deaf children and adults performed less well than hearing peers when cognitive
tasks required the relating or integrating of multiple concepts or stimulus dimen-
sions. For example, sorting categories and objects on the basis of colour or size
results in similar performance by deaf and hearing children, whereas tasks requiring
categorization on the basis of both colour and size results in relatively better per-
formance by hearing children. To understand the causes and effects of this situation,
we need to consider two other differences between deaf and hearing learners related
to the organization and use of information from semantic memory.
Semantic memory and knowledge use

Several studies have demonstrated differences in the ways that knowledge is orga-
nized in the long-term memories of deaf and hearing students. We suspect that
various findings concerning performance and achievement differences in academic
domains might reflect such differences, but that is an empirical question that
remains to be explored. Fortunately, experienced teachers of deaf children recognize
that, on average, their students have vocabulary and conceptual knowledge less rich
and more idiosyncratic than their hearing peers, a finding confirmed in various
studies (e.g. Marschark & Everhart, 1999; McEvoy et al., 1999; Marschark et al.,
2004). McEvoy et al. (1999), for example, found that lexical concepts in memory
were less strongly interconnected among deaf than hearing students and were
more likely to have diverse, idiosyncratic associations. Such differences help to
explain why prior knowledge is less frequently and effectively applied by deaf
than hearing students across academic contexts and particularly in reading (Strass-
man, 1997; Lewis & Jackson, 2001; see Rawson & Kintsch, 2002).
Findings like the above suggest that deaf students may be at risk in settings where
new information is structured for hearing learners by teachers who are unfamiliar
with deaf children’s knowledge and knowledge organization. Skilled teachers of
the deaf, however, report using strategies that reflect their recognition of qualitative
and quantitative differences in deaf students’ concept knowledge, supporting learn-
ing while providing teachers with important feedback about their students’ readiness
for greater breadth and depth of instruction. One such strategy is the use of concept
maps and other diagrams to depict relations among various concepts and the possi-
bility of their being members of different categories at the same time. A second one is
the use of games or other targeted activities aimed at demonstrating similarities and
differences among concepts at different levels, including lexical, perceptual, practical,
and taxonomical. Such strategies might seem to be obvious for use with younger
children. However, findings consistently have indicated frequent failure among
deaf children and university students to utilize taxonomical, functional, and percep-
tual knowledge spontaneously in problem solving among (Marschark & Everhart,
1999; Blatto-Vallee et al., 2007) and the lack of coherence and stability in their con-
ceptual knowledge relative to hearing peers (McEvoy et al., 1999). It thus appears
that related teaching methods might need to be employed that emphasize different
aspects of to-be-learned material with deaf students who are older than would be
expected on the basis of findings from hearing students. Experienced teachers of
deaf children and young adults report success in using such methods (e.g.
Haptonstall-Nykaza & Schick, 2007), but the possibility of transfer, effects on meta-
cognition, and their long-term impact on learning have not been evaluated.
As we noted earlier, a related issue that teachers need to be aware of is that deaf
students frequently do not utilize knowledge we know they have or that is made
available to them in various tasks in which it would be useful or is necessary
(Ottem, 1980; Ansell & Pagliaro, 2006). Banks et al. (1990) and Lewis and
Jackson (2001) obtained results with printed materials parallel to Ottem’s (1980)
review of problem-solving tasks. Lewis and Jackson, for example, found that deaf
students were less likely than hearing peers to integrate visual information from
videos with information in accompanying captions. They concluded that deaf chil-
dren ‘lag behind hearing students in their ability to generalize information or to use
prior knowledge’ (p. 49). Such findings highlight the need for teachers of deaf stu-
dents to provide a richer context for instruction than they normally would for
hearing students, explicitly tying new information to what students already know
rather than depending on them to make appropriate inferences. The use of directed
strategies of this sort by classroom teachers depends on their prior assessments of
student knowledge as well as sufficient repetition to ensure both that students recog-
nize the importance of such relational processing and that the new information is
deeply processed and retained. Skilled teachers of deaf students accommodate
such needs on a regular basis, even in the face of considerable variability in their stu-
dents’ knowledge and their lesser automaticity in information retrieval (Bebko,
1998; McEvoy et al., 1999). Exactly how they do this is unclear.
Integrative and relational processing among objects and ideas also will affect
both the quantity and quality of incidental learning. Marschark et al. (2004), for
example, found that although the category membership of a familiar object is just
as salient for deaf as for hearing students, deaf students on average are less likely
to automatically activate high-frequency category members (horse, dog, bird) in
memory when they encounter a category name (animal). That finding suggests
that deaf students’ performance in domains that depend on their use of associative
knowledge (e.g. reading, problem solving) will differ from that of hearing students
qualitatively as well as perhaps quantitatively. Such differences, in turn, will affect
higher levels of cognitive functioning, several aspects of which we consider next.
Higher-level cognitive functioning

As we move beyond the level of perception and memory to what are generally con-
sidered higher-level cognitive functions, we are dealing with processes that operate
on the output of lower-level processes as in metamemory (remembering about

remembering), metacognition (thinking about thinking), and metacomprehension
(understanding about comprehension).
Executive functioning
Executive functioning is a level of cognition including metacognition and
behavioural regulation (e.g. control of emotions, thoughts, and behaviours).
Current research suggests that language fluency is necessary for optimal executive
function development, and children with poor language skills – deaf or hearing –
will be limited in several cognitive domains as a result (Hauser et al., 2008). The
fact that many deaf children show increasing delays in age-appropriate language
as they get older means that there also may be an increasing delay in executive
functioning. Meanwhile, the need for efficient executive functioning also increases
as children get older and the classroom becomes less structured.
Executive functioning is perhaps most obviously needed when a child approaches
a novel task with minimal external support. This is a situation in which both intelli-
gence and prior knowledge are important. The more frequently children are faced
with novel tasks, the better they become at problem solving. Deaf children, and
especially those with hearing parents and teachers, however, often receive more
direction and assistance than they need and thus may have fewer opportunities
for exercising executive functioning through hypothesis testing and problem
solving. As a result, they frequently have less effective executive functioning than
hearing age-mates and become more instrumentally dependent, frequently looking
for assistance (or giving up) rather than figuring out how to solve academic, linguis-
tic, or social problems for themselves. If deaf children are to develop cognitive flexi-
bility and become independent learners, they need to learn to handle (appropriate)
challenges themselves across a variety of domains.
Another example of deaf students’ delayed executive functioning is their lesser
monitoring (or automaticity in monitoring) of comprehension and learning relative
to hearing peers. As a result, they often fail to recognize when linguistic or concep-
tual understanding has broken down. Marschark and colleagues (Marschark et al.
2005; Borgna et al., 2011), for example, have demonstrated that deaf students fre-
quently overestimate to a greater extent than hearing classmates how much they
understand and are learning via both reading and language comprehension in the
classroom. Together with deaf students’ smaller vocabularies and tendency not to
engage in as much integrative processing and inferencing, the above findings have
led to the conclusion that deaf students’ difficulties with reading are not only
about reading (Marschark et al., 2009). In particular, the failure to recognize
when comprehension is successful and when it is not suggests a problem with execu-
tive functioning or metacognition rather than (or in addition to) a difficulty related
to language processing within a particular modality.
Metacognition
Related to the issue of recognizing when something has been understood or learned
is the general finding that students who know more about a topic are better able to
judge their performance related to that topic. If anything, those students who know
more tend to underestimate their performance, while students who know less tend
not to realize how much they do not know/comprehend and tend to overestimate
their performance. This robust finding is referred to as the unskilled and unaware
effect (Kruger & Dunning, 1999).
In most studies related to the unskilled and unaware effect, involving hearing stu-
dents, it can be assumed that the participants are all language fluent without any par-
ticular (or at least identified) learning difficulties. Deaf children, in contrast, often
grow up with relatively impoverished language and education experiences that
may leave them unable to judge accurately whether and how much they comprehend
of classroom content (Harrington, 2000). Some of those students will recognize gaps
in their comprehension and learning in some settings and may attempt to compen-
sate through questions, reading, and meetings with tutors or instructors. Others
either will be unaware of their comprehension failures (Strassman, 1997) or
simply accept them as normal (Napier & Barker, 2004).
Most research concerning deaf children’s metacognition has focused on reading
and, more recently, theory of mind (see below). In general, deaf children appear
to be relatively poor at assessing their reading comprehension (or metacomprehen-
sion) and often consider themselves to be good readers even if they do not know
what that means (Kelly et al., 2001; Borgna et al., 2011). Ewoldt et al. (1992),
however, observed deaf adolescents using a variety of independent, metacognitive
reading strategies, such as re-reading the text or looking up words in a dictionary.
Their study suggested that teachers may inadvertently encourage dependent strat-
egies among deaf students. Parents also may unintentionally foster such behaviours
in young deaf readers by underestimating their reading abilities and being over-
directive. However, the finding that deaf students tend to think that they understand
more than they actually do with signed/spoken language indicates that the issue
cannot be ascribed to deaf students’ print literacy skills. Rather, these findings
appear to reflect metacognitive difficulties in either inaccurate self-monitoring or a
failure to recognize the level of information processing necessary in order to fully
understand and learn from language in the classroom. The latter possibility is sup-
ported by reports of sign language interpreters in mainstream classrooms that deaf
students behave as though if they understand an interpreter’s signs, they therefore
understand the message, even if they have not integrated the signs in a meaningful
way. This situation, of course, is intertwined with the issue of visual attention in
the classroom. That is, deaf students may not attend closely to ongoing visual com-
munication in the classroom because they think they do not have to. At the same
time, their greater visual distractibility makes sustained visual attention difficult,
with subsequent detrimental effects to comprehension.
In order to avoid such difficulties, Mayer et al. (2002) offered an approach to

classroom instruction emphasizing mutual understanding and cognitive interaction
between teachers and students, rather than the mode or modality of the language of
instruction. They identified educational practices of outstanding teachers of deaf
children such as including interactive turn-taking and expanding upon students’
statements. Mayer et al.’s ‘outstanding’ teachers were seen to scaffold classroom
interactions so as to promote students’ active involvement in ongoing inquiry, but
the extent to which scaffolding affected learning was not evaluated. Borgna et al.
(2011), however, examined the potential benefits of providing scaffolding to deaf
students’ learning and metacognition. In contrast to hearing students, deaf students
actually learned more when they did not receive prior scaffolding. This result was
found not to be due to a lack of foundational knowledge. Rather, the deaf students
appeared to lack (or at least not use) the metacognitive strategies necessary to recog-
nize and make use of scaffolding. Thiede et al. (2003) obtained similar results in a
study involving hearing students, demonstrating that scaffolding materials intended
to support learning did not improve subsequent performance unless those materials
were utilized by (hearing) students in ‘self-regulation’ of their information proces-
sing. Borgna et al.’s (2011) findings with deaf students emphasize both the need
for teachers to determine in advance the appropriateness of instructional scaffolding
for deaf students and to verify that such information is being used appropriately.
Returning to the issue of deaf students’ metacognition during reading, results
from a variety of studies generally have indicated that deaf children lag significantly
behind hearing peers in both the quality and quantity of the metacognitive strategies
they employ with print (Andrews & Mason, 1991; Strassman, 1997; Schirmer,
2003). Other studies, usually involving older students, have examined deaf students’
comprehension monitoring and their awareness of when and why it breaks down.
Gibbs (1989), for example, found that 16- to 19-year-old deaf students recognized
fewer than half of the comprehension-affecting problems she presented, such as
internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with world knowledge. Kelly et al.
(2001) obtained similar results with deaf university students. Only about 50 per
cent of the students were able to identify the main ideas of passages they read,
and fewer than 25 per cent correctly responded to questions sufficient to indicate
that they understood key content information. An intervention aimed at improving
comprehension monitoring by having students review effective metacognitive
reading strategies did not significantly improve performance.
Mousley and Kelly (1998), however, demonstrated the potential of metacognitive
interventions for deaf students in a non-verbal problem-solving task. They used the
Tower of Hanoi, a task that requires multiple actions to arrange rings on a set of
pegs in a particular order. In one experiment, Mousley and Kelly had one group
of deaf students visualize in advance the steps involved in solving the task. Those
who were given the visualization instructions solved the problem in significantly
fewer moves than students in an uninstructed comparison group, apparently
through a reduction in the number of impulsive, non-reflective moves. The
Mousley and Kelly study thus demonstrates that while deaf students frequently do
not effectively apply executive functioning and metacognitive strategies during
problem solving, they can. Whether this is a function of a failure to appropriately
match strategies with problem situations or difficulty in applying them effectively
remains to be determined. The fact that parallel findings are found in verbal- and
non-verbal (Marschark & Everhart, 1999) tasks and in social as well as academic
domains suggests that there are basic cognitive and metacognitive differences
between deaf and hearing students at play, and that related academic challenges
are not specific to literacy and mathematics, the two areas most frequently
investigated.
Social cognition
Social cognition is considered a higher-level cognitive function in that, like other
meta-level functions, it depends on the output of lower-level processes like
working memory, long-term memory, perception, and comprehension. In many
ways, social cognition is similar to reading and other problem-solving situations
in that it requires use of context (the location, those involved in the interaction,
goals, and expectations), relational processing among units (social behaviours),
and monitoring of intermediate outcomes. Two levels of social functioning are of
interest here: (1) those involving classroom dynamics created by interactions
among deaf children, peers, and teachers and (2) the social cognition abilities of
deaf children that feed into classroom interactions as well as into functioning in
other contexts.
As deafness is a low-incidence disability, few teachers or other school personnel
have encountered deaf students and thus rarely recognize their heterogeneity or
how they differ from hearing peers beyond their use of assistive listening devices
and, perhaps, sign language (see also, Alexander & Murphy, 1999; Kranzler,
1999). Social interactions among deaf and hearing peers and deaf students’
social-emotional functioning in the inclusive classroom are particularly likely to
be alien to most teachers. Given the language delays of many deaf children and
the findings described above with regard to comprehension monitoring, it should
not be surprising that miscommunication or poor communication between deaf chil-
dren, their teachers, and their peers would occur. The extent to which such com-
munication problems affect a child’s functioning in school remains unclear, but
there is some evidence available regarding related differences in the social-emotional
domain.
In contrast to deaf children in special schools (but see Wolters et al., 2011, in
press), the social functioning of deaf children in regular classrooms has been the
subject of extensive study (see Antia et al., 2010, for a review). Interactions of
social, cognitive, and academic functioning, however, have not been explored in
either population. Nevertheless, given the observed relations among school perform-
ance, mental health, and peer relations among hearing children (e.g. Doll, 1993;
Lubbers et al., 2006), it is likely that some of the academic difficulties demonstrated
by deaf children have social as well as cognitive and linguistic origins. Indeed, these
domains all likely influence each other (Chen et al., 1997; Welsh et al., 2001).
Social cognition and theory of mind

A currently popular area of study involving deaf children that we expect would
relate to both social functioning and academic performance is theory of mind.
Theory of mind refers to children’s understanding that they and others have
mental states that are not directly observable – beliefs, desires, and intentions –
including teachers’ expectations for students to do particular things in particular
situations. Odom et al. (1973) demonstrated that deaf children aged 7–12 years
could identify facial expressions of specific emotions just as well as hearing children.
However, the deaf children were not as able to predict which mental state or emotion
would result from a pictured sequence of events, demonstrating a lag in the develop-
ment of theory of mind. More recent studies show that while hearing children
develop theory of mind by 4 or 5 years of age, deaf children typically show signifi-
cant delays (Courtin & Melot, 1998; Moeller & Schick, 2006; Peterson & Siegel,
1999), but there are two caveats to that conclusion. First, Courtin (2000) and
others have found that deaf children with deaf parents perform better on theory
of mind tasks than deaf children with hearing parents, typically as well as or
better than hearing children of hearing parents. This finding generally has been inter-
preted as indicating the importance of parent–child communication concerning
emotional states, although it also has been suggested that language delay may be
a significant contributor to theory of mind delays (Schick et al., 2007; Hao et al.,
2010). Second, delays in development of theory of mind in deaf children are
found when using the most common false-belief task, but not necessarily with
other tasks.
In the simplest version of the false-belief task, a child sees a puppet hide a marble
in a basket and then ‘leave the room’. While the puppet is gone, another puppet
removes the marble from the basket and hides it in a box. When the first puppet
returns, the child is asked ‘Where will the puppet look for her marble’? or ‘Where
will she first look for her marble’? Even when deaf children pass control questions
like ‘Where is the marble really?’ or ‘Where did she put the marble in the beginning?’
ensuring that they saw and understood what happened, they still frequently fail the
false-belief questions. It is this robust result that has been used to attribute deaf chil-
dren with delayed theory of mind. Studies by Rhys-Jones and Ellis (2000), Rieffe and
Terwogt (2000), and Marschark et al. (2000), however, all found that when deaf
children were in situations where they were telling or re-telling stories involving
interactions among protagonists, they were actually more likely than hearing chil-
dren to make reference to mental states, suggesting advanced or at least
age-appropriate theory of mind.
Unlike simply being aware of others’ mental states – and by definition having
a theory of mind – successful performance on false-belief tasks requires children
both to recognize the mental states of others and also be able to predict performance
based on such understanding (Gopnik et al., 1994; Marschark et al., 2000; Remmel
& Peters, 2009). Deaf children’s apparent capability to recognize that others have
mental states thus may reflect their attention to the faces of significant others with
whom they interact. Their difficulties with the more complex false-belief task, in
contrast, may be a reflection of their well-documented lesser automaticity in rela-
tional processing relative to hearing peers. Just as deaf children of deaf parents
acquire joint visual attention with their mothers through social interactions earlier
than deaf children of hearing parents, they may develop other relational processing
strategies earlier, including those that underlie recognizing links between behaviour
and perceived mental states. Although this prediction is still in need of empirical
investigation, the above findings generally suggest that both the acquisition of
theory of mind and the ability or likelihood of using it in various situations
(either automatically or intentionally) are not simple or unidimensional, but
involve various kinds of knowledge and subskills brought together through chil-
dren’s executive functioning. This means that they also are likely to be affected by
the amount of hearing the child has. It therefore will be worthwhile to consider
several studies that have focused on theory of mind in deaf children with CIs.
Even with the improved hearing provided by CIs, those children appear in many
ways cognitively more similar to other deaf children than to hearing children (Pisoni
& Cleary, 2003; Stacey et al., 2006; Fagan et al., 2007; Geers et al., 2008; James
et al., 2008). Theory of mind is one of those areas (e.g. Lundy, 2002; Peterson,
2004; Moeller & Schick, 2006; Remmel & Peters, 2009). Peterson (2004) explored
the possibility that 4- to 12-year-old deaf children with CIs might demonstrate better
performance in false belief tasks because of their greater access to related language
in the family. Contrary to her expectation that the children with CIs should demon-
strate superior language development compared to peers with hearing aids,
however, she found that the two groups did not differ on either the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test or the Word Classes and Relations subscale of the Test of
Auditory Comprehension of Language. The children also did not differ significantly
in language ability as a function of whether or not sign language was used in school.
Most importantly, deaf children with CIs and those who used hearing aids did not
differ in false belief task performance, even while both performed significantly below
a younger hearing group.
Moeller and Schick (2006) examined the social-linguistic interactions of hearing
mothers and their deaf children as precursors of ‘development of false belief under-
standing’ (p. 753). All the deaf children were reported to rely on signed communi-
cation in interactions with their mothers, even though 10 of the 22 had CIs
(including two non-users). Overall, deaf children with and without CIs did not
differ significantly in their performance on language measures or on verbal false
belief tasks, although as a group they were delayed in both domains relative to a
hearing comparison group. Consistent with the suggestion noted earlier, Moeller
and Schick found that mothers of hearing children referred to mental states in
language directed at their children more often than mothers of deaf children.
Although degree of hearing loss was not significantly related to their performance on
the false belief task, mothers’ sign language skills, strongly correlated with false
belief performance, as did children’s language skills and the frequency of mothers’
‘mental talk’ (but not non-mental talk). Moeller and Schick concluded that
mother–child dyads with more effective means of communication are better able
to promote social understanding, which lies at the heart of false-belief performance.
Remmel and Peters (2009) also explored the development of theory of mind in
children with CIs in an effort to clarify the relation between language ability and
theory of mind performance. They found no difference in false-belief performance
between children with CIs, aged 3–12 years, and hearing age-mates. In contrast to
Peterson’s (2004) findings, that result was attributed to the children with implants
demonstrating age-appropriate receptive and expressive language scores. These
and other results led Remmel and Peters to suggest that their sample may have
been fortuitously composed of implant ‘stars’ rather than a more representative
sample. Indeed, they indicated that half of the children with implants were recruited
from a centre that explicitly excluded from selection children with known cognitive
disabilities (Geers, 2003) and that they could not be sure that parents and children
who participated in the study were representative.
Better access to spoken language has been assumed to support both theory of
mind (Peterson, 2004) and cognitive development (Pisoni et al., 2008), but it
remains unclear as to whether improvements in speech and hearing provided by
CIs are directly related to advantages in the development of theory of mind. Most
and Peled (2007) found that the access to language provided by CIs often is of insuf-
ficient fidelity to capture many of the emotional aspects of speech, characteristics
that one would expect to be necessary for the development of theory of mind.
The above results also might be taken to suggest that the link between spoken
language and cognition is not as direct as some would believe. As research into cog-
nitive functioning among children with implants becomes more focused, consider-
ation of social-emotional functioning and reception of the nuances of
interpersonal communication clearly need to be considered. At present, however,
it should not be assumed that simply because children with CIs are frequently in
regular classrooms that their strengths and needs are the same as their hearing peers.
Finally, in our view, theory of mind and related skills are particularly important to
the teaching–learning enterprise insofar as they allow children to place teachers’
language and behaviour in a larger context, affecting both learning and generaliz-
ation from learning. Although studies have not yet examined possible links
between theory of mind and academic achievement, we expect that encouraging
deaf students to reflect on relations of particular tasks to the academic content at
hand and the goals of teachers in those tasks will help them to better deploy appro-
priate cognitive and metacognitive strategies. It is precisely this kind of modification
to teaching we have in mind when we suggest that teachers need to adjust their
methods and materials to accommodate cognitive differences between deaf and
hearing students.
From research to practice

Research over the past decade has provided a better understanding of deaf students’
classroom learning, the contributions of communicative and demographic factors,
and the cognitive and metacognitive foundations of their academic achievement.
Teachers of the deaf frequently lack content background that their students need
(Kluwin & Moores, 1989; Kelly et al., 2003) and do not always use learning time
effectively (Donne & Zigmond, 2008). Their relationships with their students are
also less valued, in general, than those between teachers and hearing students,
both by the teachers themselves and by their deaf students (Knoors & Hermans,
2010). Teachers in regular classrooms, meanwhile, are likely to be unfamiliar with
the cognitive and knowledge base differences of deaf students relative to their
hearing age-mates. Despite decades of intuitively appealing interventions, academic
outcomes for deaf students thus remain unacceptably low in both settings. Indeed,
recent reviews of evidence-based practice in educating deaf students (Easterbrooks
& Stephenson, 2006; Spencer & Marschark, 2010) have indicated a remarkable
lack of coherence in the research base concerning classroom teaching and learning.
We now know that deaf and hearing children need some different things in the class-
room, but we do not fully know what those accommodations are or how it is that
(some) teachers deliver them.
The suggestion that instructional factors might explain a significant proportion of
the variability in deaf students’ academic achievement is not new (e.g. Kluwin &
Moores, 1985, 1989; Marschark et al., 2008). It is only recently, however, that
we have begun to identify the strategies used by experienced teachers of deaf stu-
dents and transfer them to teachers in regular and special classrooms. Spencer
and Marschark (2010) found that there are few studies of teaching methods for
any area of the curriculum that have involved rigorous research designs, comparison
groups, and disentangling of likely confounding factors. Similarly, Easterbrooks and
Stephenson (2006) surveyed a number of teacher practices and found many to have
either an ‘emerging research base’ or no research basis at all. It is thus difficult to
determine the extent to which various instructional factors influence deaf students’
achievement, even as legislation in several countries has emphasized the importance
of instructional practice being evidence based. As Easterbrooks (2008, p. 12) noted,
‘Practice-based sources derive from practices based on a small number of studies or
on professional wisdom. Often, these are so widely used that there is an implicit pro-
fessional assumption that such practices are effective’. Still, so powerful are many of
these practices that many teachers, school administrators, researchers, and policy-
makers assume that they are explicitly supported by evidence when they are not.
Although, there has been little research into what classroom modifications made
by teachers of the deaf actually result in better student outcomes, Edwards (2010)
and Hauser et al. (2008) emphasized the importance of teachers’ facilitating those
aspects of deaf children’s visual, social, cognitive, and language skills that specifi-
cally support executive functioning skills. Those include directed shifting of
attention, behavioural control, instrumental independence, and use of metacognitive

strategies in academic and non-academic interactions. These are appealing sugges-
tions grounded in preliminary research, but they are in need of transfer to real-world
settings. And, of course, there are other issues likely to arise. Based on their inter-
actions with deaf children, for example, teachers may not place high-enough expec-
tations on them, leading to underperformance and increasing lags in that domain.
They may too readily accept deaf students’ claims of comprehension when in fact
their grasp of the material is superficial or they may accept partially correct
answers to questions as ‘good enough’.
Earlier, we discussed the need of teachers to provide deaf children with the visual
cues they need to help maintain control of attention and guide them towards infor-
mation targets in order to provide them with full access to instruction. Over time,
guided attention will facilitate further development of both the allocation of atten-
tion and metacognition, helping to teach deaf students how to discern for them-
selves what is important to learning and what is not. Along the same lines,
teachers need to be aware that they possibly treat deaf and hearing children differ-
ently in ongoing classroom activities. Cawthon (2001), for example, found that
teachers in inclusive classrooms directed less communication to deaf than
hearing students and were more likely to ask them yes/no rather than open-ended
questions. Such limitations are a frequent consequence of mainstream teachers’
lack of familiarity with deaf children, sign language interpreters, and assistive lis-
tening devices. By failing to fully engage deaf children in ongoing communication
and discussion in the classroom, they are failing to support visual attention,
targeted information processing, and acquisition of the self-regulation strategies
necessary to benefit from instruction.
Given how long we have been aware of deaf students’ underachievement and the
hundreds of studies that have sought to identify and eliminate barriers to their
success, it is important to acknowledge that determining exactly how instructional
strategies in general and special education classrooms need to be modified for deaf
children is not straightforward (Detterman & Thompson, 1997; Knoors &
Hermans, 2010). The first step in this process requires that teachers, and teachers
in mainstream classrooms in particular, be informed about the particular strengths
and needs of deaf students. General information in this regard would be helpful,
but specifics with regard to individual children are essential, whether provided
by previous teachers, school psychologists, or parents (or all of these). A period
of co-teaching by a teacher of the deaf and a mainstream teacher could be
helpful in integrating information into teaching practices (Knoors & Hermans,
2010). Meanwhile, educators and investigators need to work together to deter-
mine which interventions are most effective for which students in which
contexts. For example, now that we recognize that deaf students’ visuospatial
advantages may also lead to visual distraction, we have to learn how to be more
sensitive to their visual needs in the classroom and how to take advantage of
their visual strengths.
It has long been recognized that deaf learners at essentially all ages come into the
classroom with lesser content knowledge and smaller vocabularies than hearing
classmates. Now that it is known that this applies to essentially all languages of
instruction, regardless of whether they are signed, spoken, or written, it is incumbent
on teachers to identify student knowledge (and gaps in knowledge) early, so as to
provide additional support and avoid the possibility of deaf children falling
further behind. This is especially important given the recent findings with regard
to metacognition, indicating that deaf students may not be aware when they are
not comprehending fully and may not automatically apply knowledge they have
in new situations. Similarly, deaf children will benefit if classroom tasks are not
overly reliant on sequential memory and/or explicit training on alternative strategies
that can support retention. Practice in considering concepts, situations, and pro-
blems from alternative perspectives also will be helpful. The use of teaching
materials like concept maps, scaffolding, and diagrams can support deaf children’s
learning only if they are understood and actively utilized. Teachers should not
assume that simply providing such materials will be sufficient, even if a deaf
student indicates that their purpose is comprehended. Frequent ‘checking in’ is
essential to ensure that language and cognitive delays (some of which may not be
obvious) are not interfering with learning and integration of new information
with what is already known.
We recognize that strategies which appear likely to be effective frequently are
hampered by a lack of teacher training, time pressure, and challenges inherent in
teaching mixed-ability groups (Easterbrooks et al., 2006). We therefore believe
that the most efficient and effective approach is for investigators first to identify
instructional methods that are associated with deaf students’ academic achievement.
Relationships among those instructional strategies, typical cognitive characteristics
of deaf students, and academic outcomes then can provide the basis for creating
specific interventions that can be implemented across a variety of classroom settings.
It will then be their responsibility to disseminate those findings in interventions to
parents, teachers, and other educational professionals. In other words, research evi-
dence about effective instructional strategies has to be translated into actual teaching
behaviour that should be learned in the actual context of teaching, inside the class-
room, supported by activities such as video coaching, mentoring, and peer class-
room observations. Ultimately, this will require moving from research to practice
and back again in order to design, implement, and fine-tune interventions that are
effective across a broad range of teachers, students, and settings. But a journey of
1000 miles begins with a single step.
Acknowledgements
Portions of this chapter are based on Knoors and Marschark (2012) and Marschark
and Hauser (2012).
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Notes on contributors
This paper is based on a broader discussion focusing specifically on challenges in
inclusive education published by the authors as, ‘Sprache, Kognition und Lernen:
Herausforderungen der Inklusion für gehörlose und schwerhörige Kinder’ in
M. Hintermair (Ed), Inklusion, Ethik und Hörschädigung.

Marc Marschark, PhD, is a Professor at the National Technical Institute for the
Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, Moray House School of Edu-
cation at the University of Edinburgh, and the School of Psychology at the University
of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is also Director of the Center for Education Research
Partnerships at RIT (www.rit.edu/ntid/cerp). Address: National Technical Institute
for the Deaf, 52 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623 USA, (e-mail:
Marc.Marschark@rit.edu).
Harry Knoors, PhD, is a Professor in deaf education at the Radboud University
Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also general Director Knowledge & Innovation
at Royal Dutch Kentalis in Sint-Michielsgestel (www.kentalis.com). Address:
Royal Dutch Kentalis, Petrus Dondersplein 1, 5271 AA Sint-Michielsgestel, The
Netherlands (e-mail h.knoors@kentalis.nl).

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Deafness & Education International

ISSN: 1464-3154 (Print) 1557-069X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ydei20

Educating Deaf Children: Language, Cognition, and

Marc Marschark & Harry Knoors

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/1557069X12Y.0000000010

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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