Visual Calculation Processes
in Finnish Sign Language
Marja Huovila, Päivi Rainò & Irja Seilola
DEAFVOC - Conference on Deaf education with a special focus on vocational education
Klagenfurt 19.11.2010
Research results 1
Blatto-Vallee, Kelly & Gaustad & al. 2007: Visual-Spatial Representation in Mathematical Problem Solving by Deaf and Hearing Students. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 12: 4, 2007.
” - - hearing subject’s performance on the mathematical problem-sovling task was consistently higher than their deaf peers accross all educational levels. The deaf baccalaureate students exhibited the highest performance of all the deaf participants but only performed at the level of the hearing middle school students who were the lowest scoring hearing group.”
Research results 2
Nunes & Bryant & Burman et al.: Deaf Children’s Understanding of Inverse Relations. In Deaf Cognition. Foundations and Outcomes. Eds. Marc Marschark and Peter C. Hauser
”The deaf children found it relatively difficult to use the inversion principle. Their scores in the basic inversion problems were significantly lower than those of a comparable gorup of hearing children. - -Deaf children’s entry into school is delayed.- - The intervention group out-performed a control group both in an immediate post-test of the understanding of the logical principles and, about 1 year later, in the government administereed mathematics achievement tests.”
Research results
Kelly Ronald R. 2008: Deaf Learners and Mathematical Problem Solving.In Deaf Cognition. Foundations and Outcomes. Eds. Marc Marschark and Peter C. Hauser.
” - - deaf students’ English and reading skills, as well as their knowledge of mathematics and science, suggest that they are considerably under-prepared for advanced studies at the postsecondary level. At entry to college, only about 20 % of deaf students meet or exceed the college readiness benchmarks for English and reading. For science reasoning and mathematics, only 10-15 % meet or exceed c.r.b.
More emphasis on analytical strategies
instruction how to graphically create visual-spatial representations that show numerical relationships
emphasizing reading precision
Research results 4
•Lang & Pagliaro 2007: Factors Predicting Recall of Mathematics Terms by Deaf Students: Implications for Teaching. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 12: 4, 2007.
•” Various studies have indicated that the way teachers sign techical content have the potential to influence learning by deaf students. - - High signability terms are easier to recall than low signability terms. - - We recommend more research to examine how imagery may be promoted through the use visual materials, especially when unfamiliar and abstract terms and concepts are being taught - - The potential of sign language to enhance visualization skills should also be explored.”
”Always start adding
with the units first”
People, who use sign-language, add like people, who use Abacus.
7948 + 1223 = 7000 + 1000 + 948 + 223 = 8000 + 900 + 200 + 48 + 23 = 8000 + 1100 + 48 + 23 =
9000 + 100 + 40 + 20 + 8 + 3 = 9100 + 60 + 11 = 9171
Learning difficulties or cultural ~ linguistic constraint?
Hearing & Finnish culture:
- Mental arithmetic
- Use of fingers shun during calculation processes
- Didactical instructions:
- ” When writing down sums, separate the numbers intounits, tens, hundreds and thousands. List the numbers in a column and always start adding with the units first.”
Deaf Culture & FinSL
- Visual arithmetic
- Use of fingers
- visualizing numbers
- when counting
during calculation processes
= > visual abacus
- Calculation starts from ”right to left”, from biggest numbers to smallest; units last.
Visual mathematics in web: