Level of Educational Attainment Among Deaf Adults Who Attended Bilingual-Bicultural Programs

In Scandinavia and some other countries, a bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was celebrated in national programs from the mid-1980s until the broad popularity of cochlear implantation in middle 2000s created a shift back to an emphasis on spoken language for many deaf children. At the same time, only a few studies evaluated the long-term outcomes of bilingual-bicultural education, and several of their findings have raised questions about benefits of the approach. This study examined the level of educational attainment of 408 deaf individuals who attended primary school either before or during the period of bilingual-bicultural education in Denmark, both relative to a comparable hearing cohort. Beyond group comparisons, three logistic regression models were created to evaluate the prediction of educational attainment by a number of relevant variables. Compared to the hearing population, the deaf population had a significantly lower level of educational attainment both before and after the introduction of bilingual-bicultural education. Signed language and spoken language abilities, the kind of school attended, degree of hearing loss, parental hearing loss, and gender were found significantly to explain levels of educational attainment in the deaf population.