Promoting deaf children’s numeracy.
Terezinha Nunes & Constanza Moreno.

Deaf children are considerably behind hearing children of the same age in mathematics. This results both from their reduced amount of incidental learning as a consequence of their hearing loss and from their preference for processing information presented visually rather than auditorily.
This project aimed to :

- include in the mathematics lessons for deaf children the teaching of mathematical ideas learned informally by hearing children.

- make drawings and diagrams into tools for deaf children to represent and communicate about mathematical problems in the classroom. Teachers from six schools worked with their 24 pupils in testing a special numeracy programme for deaf chidren.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme, the children were tested before and after the intervention on a standardised mathematics achievement test. Their results were compared to non-project children who where attending the same schools in previous years. Before the intervention the project pupils did not differ from non-project pupils. After the intervention their performance was significantly better. Project pupils also performed significantly better at the end of the year than predicted from their pre-test scores. Thus the programme was effective in making the mathematics curriculum more accessible to the deaf pupils.