Deaf college students' reading comprehension and strategy use.

Area of Science:

• Education
• Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Deaf college students often face challenges in reading comprehension.
• Assessing reading comprehension accurately is crucial for academic success.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the reading comprehension skills of deaf college students.
• To investigate the effectiveness of strategy review instruction on improving reading comprehension in this population.

Main Methods:

• Two studies were conducted with 46 deaf college students.
• Study 1 assessed main idea identification, content questions, vocabulary understanding, and incongruent sentence recognition.
• Study 2 examined the impact of strategy review instruction on reading comprehension.

Main Results:

• Deaf students tended to overestimate their reading comprehension abilities.
• Students struggled to identify topically incongruent sentences, suggesting a need for metacognitive evaluation.
• Higher-level reading ability students showed comprehension improvement after strategy review, but lower-level students did not.

Conclusions:

• Deaf college students may possess a gap between perceived and actual reading comprehension.
• Targeted instructional strategies are needed, particularly for lower-level reading ability students.
• Further research should explore effective interventions to enhance reading comprehension for all deaf learners.