Teaching With Picture Books on Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students'Creativity

Studies have shown that teaching with picture books can help improve creativity development of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. A quasi-experimental research design was applied in this study. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in grades 3-6 from two cities, B and T, were selected as the samples in a pilot study. The Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC) test tool (Ver. A) was applied to measure creativity through student performance on individual tests of divergent and integrative thinking. Following thirty 40-min lessons over 10 weeks, the EPoC test tool (Ver. B) was used to measure student creativity in the experimental and control groups. The results showed the following: (1) the performance of DHH students was better on graphic divergence than on verbal divergence, (2) performance on the divergent dimensions of creativity was significantly higher for DHH students from the experimental group than the control group, and (3) there was no difference in integrative thinking between the two groups in the posttest. In practice, teachers could use picture books in their lesson plans to improve the creativity of DHH students that results from divergent thinking. Future research should focus on the development of creativity in DHH students through integrative thinking with a longer teaching intervention.