Enhancing participation of deaf engineering students in lab discussion

Abstract

Students who are deaf and hard of hearing (deaf) are underrepresented in engineering disciplines, in part because they do not have full access to spoken information even with aural-to-visual accommodations. In lecture or labs, they rely on captions that display speech as text in real-time, and usually watch captions through a personal display via laptop or tablet. While the deaf student is able to view the captions easily, the disadvantage is that they have to focus on a visually separated screen from the lab activities, and they cannot easily see the current lab activity or other students. They also cannot tell who is talking or when, and cannot interrupt. This viewing isolation contributes to student frustration and risk of doing poorly or withdrawing from introductory engineering courses with lab components. It also contributes to their lack of inclusion and sense of belonging. To a smaller extent, some hearing students misunderstand spoken information, especially in lab environments. We report on the evaluation of an extension to our Real-Time Text Display (RTTD), to handle multiple speakers (RTTD-MS), for engineering labs. RTTD was developed to reduce frustration in following the teacher and other peers during laboratory and other academic settings. The system projects a real-time display of captions (RTTD) above a teacher who can move around the room during the class or laboratory, which may aid deaf students in viewing both the speaker and the speaker's words as text. Our first study with RTTD found that deaf students in engineering course lectures significantly prefer RTTD over traditional classroom captions. Our second study revealed that hearing students also preferred it over no captions at all. The hearing students preferred it because they could review spoken information that they misheard or missed, by reviewing captions that are displayed for several seconds. We also asked them about their perception of accessibility and inclusiveness of course lectures and lab sessions. The answers indicated that deaf students felt lab sessions were more confusing than classroom lectures, and that they were not satisfied with the accessibility of captions, and did not feel included as they did not know who was speaking. New hearing students also felt they missed information when they did not understand unfamiliar words or concepts in group activities in lab sessions. This paper examines how deaf and hearing students used the system to access speech presented as text, and inclusiveness in lectures and discussion. The study gathered both quantitative and qualitative information from each feature of the system display, such as speaker identification and the number of displayed lines. It reports the feedback and comments from the students on how direct and alternative access to spoken information promotes accessibility and inclusion of both deaf and hearing students in first year, engineering lab sections.