Browsing by Author "Hodges, Leanna, 1991-"

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My child is deaf, now what? A convergent mixed methods study on second to fourth grade deaf and hard of hearing students, their families, and the factors that influence skilled reading.
(2023-08) Hodges, Leanna, 1991-; Kaul, Corina R., 1969-
Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students do not have the literacy or language skills needed for everyday life (Goberis et al., 2012; Greene-Woods & Delgado, 2020; Kirk Thagard et al., 2011; Zazove et al., 2013). Parents are responsible for the development of reading and language before the matriculation of school, but parents with DHH children are often unprepared and lack the tools needed to teach their DHH children. Parents need the supports, tools, and resources to make educational and linguistic decisions for their DHH children (Gascon-Ramos et al., 2010; Hyde et al., 2010; Lederberg et al., 2013; Pimperton et al., 2017; Subbiah et al., 2018). I utilized a convergent mixed methods research study taking on Scarborough’s Reading Rope (2001) theory to analyze DHH students’ reading scores and interview their families to learn about their early childhood intervention (ECI) experiences before age three. In the quantitative phase, I used the Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR; Pavelko & Owens, 2017) to appraise language comprehension, the Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST; Kilpatrick, 2018) to assess word recognition, and the Developmental Reading Assessment-2 (DRA-2; Pearson, 2011) to determine the skilled reading level for each DHH participant. In the qualitative phase, I conducted semi-structured interviews. The participants for my interviews were five parents who had a DHH child from the quantitative phase of my study. I converged the data after the conclusion of each phase to compare, contrast, and merge the results. The findings indicated that an earlier diagnosis, support for language comprehension, and support for word recognition could contribute to higher reading scores for DHH children. Implications of this study were to express the importance of early identification and provide support DHH children’s language comprehension, word recognition, and skilled reading. Increasing the number of ECI support for parents of DHH could impact their reading level and break the longstanding struggle the DHH population have with reading.