Schindler Maike, Doderer Jan H, Simon Anna L, Schaffernicht Erik, Lilienthal Achim J, Schäfer Karolin
Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
School of Science and Technology, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2022 Aug 22;13:909775. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.909775. eCollection 2022.
Students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) often show significant difficulties in learning mathematics. Previous studies have reported that students who are DHH lag several years behind in their mathematical development compared to hearing students. As possible reasons, limited learning opportunities due to a lesser incidental exposure to numerical ideas, delays in language and speech development, and further idiosyncratic difficulties of students who are DHH are discussed; however, early mathematical skills and their role in mathematical difficulties of students who are DHH are not explored sufficiently. In this study, we investigate whether students who are DHH differ from hearing students in their ability to enumerate small sets (1-9)-an ability that is associated with mathematical difficulties and their emergence. Based on a study with = 63 who are DHH and = 164 hearing students from third to fifth grade attempting 36 tasks, we used eye tracking, the recording of students' eye movements, to qualitatively investigate student enumeration processes. To reduce the effort of qualitative analysis of around 8,000 student enumeration processes (227 students x 36 tasks), we used Artificial Intelligence, in particular, a clustering algorithm, to identify student enumeration processes from the heatmaps of student gaze distributions. Based on the clustering, we found that gaze distributions of students who are DHH and students with normal hearing differed significantly on a group level, indicating differences in enumeration processes, with students who are DHH using advantageous processes (e.g., enumeration "at a glance") more often than hearing students. The results indicate that students who are DHH do not lag behind in small number enumeration as compared to hearing students but, rather, appear to perform better than their hearing peers in small number enumeration processes, as well as when conceptual knowledge about the part-whole relationship is involved. Our study suggests that the mathematical difficulties of students who are DHH are not related to difficulties in the small number enumeration, which offers interesting perspectives for further research.
失聪或有听力障碍（DHH）的学生在学习数学时往往表现出显著困难。先前的研究报告称，与听力正常的学生相比，DHH学生在数学发展方面落后数年。作为可能的原因，文中讨论了由于较少偶然接触数字概念导致学习机会有限、语言和言语发展延迟以及DHH学生特有的其他困难；然而，早期数学技能及其在DHH学生数学困难中的作用尚未得到充分探讨。在本研究中，我们调查了DHH学生在枚举小集合（1 - 9）的能力方面是否与听力正常的学生存在差异——这种能力与数学困难及其出现有关。基于一项对63名DHH学生和164名三至五年级听力正常学生进行36项任务的研究，我们使用眼动追踪，即记录学生的眼动，来定性研究学生的枚举过程。为了减少对约8000个学生枚举过程（227名学生×36项任务）进行定性分析的工作量，我们使用人工智能，特别是一种聚类算法，从学生注视分布的热图中识别学生的枚举过程。基于聚类分析，我们发现DHH学生和听力正常学生的注视分布在群体层面存在显著差异，这表明枚举过程存在差异，DHH学生比听力正常的学生更频繁地使用有利的过程（例如，“一眼”枚举）。结果表明，与听力正常的学生相比，DHH学生在小数字枚举方面并不落后，相反，在小数字枚举过程中以及涉及部分 - 整体关系的概念知识时，他们似乎比听力正常的同龄人表现更好。我们的研究表明，DHH学生的数学困难与小数字枚举困难无关，这为进一步研究提供了有趣的视角。
