NTID center to study deaf education

From: Rochester Business Journal - Rochester,NY,USA - Nov 14, 2006

By JANICE BULLARD PIETERSE
Rochester Business Journal
November 14, 2006

A new Center for Education Research Partnerships at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf has received $1.1 million to foster links between research and practice in deaf education, NTID officials said Tuesday.

NTID, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, received the grant from the National Science Foundation to examine learning through sign language interpreting and real-time captioning, as well as to understand how deaf students handle multimedia instruction in high-tech classrooms.

“Are deaf children just hearing children who cannot hear?” Center Director Marc Marschark said in a statement. “If so, educating deaf children would be a lot easier than it is. If one removed the communication barriers in the classroom, deaf and hearing students should be performing similarly. But the two groups have different backgrounds, experiences and knowledge. It is not that simple.”

External funding lets the center work with schools, parent and educational groups, and other agencies as well as students at NTID, officials said. Partnerships have been established with a number of groups, including research centers in the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Canada and Australia.

“We are at a threshold in deaf education,” said Marschark. “New findings suggest that we have not made as much progress as we expected because we have been looking in the wrong places for some of the answers.”

(c) 2006 Rochester Business Journal.