Academic engagement in students with a hearing loss in distance education

This investigation compared 267 students with a hearing loss and 178 students with no declared form of disability who were taking courses by distance learning in terms of their scores on an abbreviated version of the Academic Engagement Form. Students with a hearing loss obtained lower scores than students with no disability with regard to communication with other students, but some felt that communication was easier than in a traditional academic situation. Students who were postvocationally deaf had lower scores than students with no disability on learning from other students, but they obtained higher scores on student autonomy and student control. In general, the impact of a hearing loss on engagement in distance education is rel-atively slight. Richardson and Woodley (1999) investigated ap-proaches to studying in students with a hearing loss who were taking courses in higher education by distance learning. In general, these students seemed to be just as capable of adopting approaches to studying that were appropriate to higher education as were students with no disability. The students who had been deaf from childhood showed an overcautious reliance on details, and this was ascribed to the speech-based education to which most of these students would have been exposed. However, the most consistent result was that the students with a hearing loss showed an increased ‘‘fear of failure’’: a concern with maintaining self-esteem as opposed to intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. The students ’ comments suggested that this might be related to negative experiences with tutors or other students. Unfortunately, little is known about how people with a hearing loss experience higher education (but see Lang, 2002). On the one hand, they are marginalized in the literature on deaf education. In the past, some commentators have given the impression that univer-sities are places where hearing researchers explore the educational aspects of deafness, but not places where one might find any deaf students (Moores, 1990). It is still common to find books on deaf education that barely refer to higher education at all (see Gregory