The Beliefs and Attitudes about Deaf Education (BADE) Scale: A Tool for Assessing the Dispositions of Parents and Educators

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of the Beliefs and Attitudes about Deaf Education (BADE) scale and presents psychometric information derived from the administration of the scale to a national sample of parents, teachers, and program administrators during Wave 1 data collection of the Early Educational Longitudinal Study (EELS). Initially the scale had 47 items; however, 26 items were eliminated during analysis because they were found to be either redundant or not contributing to the most significant underlying latent attitudinal factors. We examined the content of the items loading highly on the factors in this final analysis to determine appropriate subscale labels for the factors. These are as follows: 1) Literacy through Hearing Technologies and/or Visual Support for Speech Comprehension; 2) Visual Language and Bilingualism; 3) Listening and Spoken Language; and 4) Difficulties Associated with Hearing Parents Learning ASL. The BADE scale will be helpful to families with deaf children and the professionals working with them as they explore the different communication options and their own personal beliefs and attitudes toward deaf education.

Share and Cite:

Clark, M. , Baker, S. , Choi, S. & Allen, T. (2013). The Beliefs and Attitudes about Deaf Education (BADE) Scale: A Tool for Assessing the Dispositions of Parents and Educators. Psychology, 4, 1030-1038. doi: 10.4236/psych.2013.412150.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1] Allen, T. (1986). Patterns of academic achievement among hearing impaired students: 1974 and 1983. In A. Schildroth, & M. Karchmer (Eds.), Deaf children in America (pp. 161-206). San Diego, CA: College Hill Press.
[2] Allen, T., & Morere, D. A. (2012). Underlying neurocognitive and achievement factors and their relationship to student background characteristics. In D. A. Morere, & T. Allen (Eds.), Assessing literacy in deaf individuals: Neurocognitive measurement and predictors (pp. 231-261). New York: Springer.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5269-0_13
[3] Benedict, B. (2013). How early intervention can make a difference: Research and trends. The VL2 Educational Neuroscience Presentation Series, 2, Washington DC: Gallaudet University.
[4] Conrad, R. (1979). The deaf school child. London: Harper and Row.
[5] Doyle, M. E., & Smith, M. K. (2007). Jean-Jacques Rousseau on nature, wholeness and education.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rous.htm
[6] Easterbrooks, S. R., & Baker, S. K. (2002). Language learning in children who are deaf and hard of hearing: Multiple pathways. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
[7] Field, A. (2009). Discovering statistics using SPSS. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.
[8] Freel, B. L., Clark, M. D., Anderson, M. L., Gilbert, G. L., Musyoka, M. M., & Hauser, P. C. (2011). Deaf individuals’ bilingual abilities: American sign language proficiency, reading skills, and family characteristics. Psychology, 2, 18-23.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/psych.2011.21003
[9] Hauser, P. C., O’Hearn, A., McKee, M. G., Steider, A. M., & Thew, D. (2010). Deaf epistemology: Deafhood and deafness. American Annals of the Deaf, 154, 486-492.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aad.0.0120
[10] Holcomb, T. K. (2010). Deaf epistemology: The deaf way of knowing. American Annals of the Deaf, 154, 471-478.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aad.0.0116
[11] Ladd, P. (2002). Understanding deaf culture: In search of deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
[12] Lane, S. (1989). Determining the determiner: Aspects of teaching “the” and “a” in ESL. Washington DC: US Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. National Association for Foreign Student Affairs Conference.
[13] Markowitz, J., Carlson, E., Frey, W., Riley, J., Shimshak, A., Heinzen, H., Strohl, J., Lee, H., & Klein, S. (2006). Preschoolers’ characteristics, services, and results: Wave 1 overview report from the Pre-Elementary Education Longitudinal Study (PEELS). Rockville, MD: Westat. www.peels.org.
[14] Marschark, M., & Harris, M. (1996). Success and failure in learning to read: The special case of deaf children. In J. Oakhill & C. Cornoldi (Eds.), Children’s reading comprehension disabilities: Processes and intervention (pp. 279-300). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
[15] Marvelli, A. L. (1973). An historical examination and organizational analysis of the Smith College-Clarke School for the deaf graduate teacher education program. Dissertation Abstracts International, 7415029.
[16] Mayberry, R.I., & Lock, E. (2003). Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: Evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesist. Brain and Language, 87, 369-384.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00137-8
[17] Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Pinar, P., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations? Cognition, 118, 286-292.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.006
[18] Musselman, C. (2000). How do children who can’t hear learn to read an alphabetic script? A review of the literature on reading and deafness. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 5, 9-31.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/deafed/5.1.9
[19] Nover, S., Andrews, J., Baker, S., Everhart, V., & Bradford, M. (2002). Staff development in ASL/English bilingual instruction for deaf students: Evaluation and impact study. Center for ASL/English Bilingual Education and Research: New Mexico School for the Deaf.
[20] Nussbaum, D. B., Scott, S., & Simms, L. E. (2012). The “why” and “how” of an asl/English bimodal bilingual program. Odyssey, 13, 14-19.
[21] Padden, C. (1980). The deaf community and the culture of deaf people. In C. Baker, & R. Pattison (Eds.) Sign language and the deaf community. Silver Spring: National Association of the Deaf.
[22] Pénicaud, S., Klein, D., Zatorre, R. J., Chen, J., Witcher, P, Hyde, K., & Mayberry, R. I. (2013). Structural brain changes linked to delayed first language acquisition in congenitally deaf individuals. NeuroImage, 66, 42-49.
[23] Scouten, E., Warren, K., Burns, K., Ray, B., Basile, M. L., Avery, K., & Menkis, P. (1984). Dactylology: Words on your hands. New York: Rochester Technical Institute of Technology, National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
[24] Simms, L., & Thumann, H. (2007). In search of a new, linguistically and culturally sensitive paradigm in deaf education. American Annals of the Deaf, 152, 302-311.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aad.2007.0031
[25] Solomon, A., (2012). Far from the tree: Parents, children, and search for identity. New York: Scribner.
[26] Visual Language and Visual Learning Science of Learning Center. (2011). Advantages of early visual language (Research Brief No. 2). Washington DC: Sharon Baker.

Copyright © 2024 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Creative Commons License

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.