TITLE:
Administrators’ Reports of School Context in the Early Education Longitudinal Study (EELS)
AUTHORS:
Ju-Lee A. Wolsey, Daqian Dang, Hannah A. Joharchi, M. Diane Clark
KEYWORDS:
Early Education Longitudinal Study (EELS), Annual Survey, School Administrator, Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Children, Early Childhood Education
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.6 No.16,
December
29,
2015
ABSTRACT: The goal of the current project was to investigate the characteristics of a cohort of school administrators whose schools participated in the Early Education Longitudinal Study (EELS) conducted by the National Science Foundation’s Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University. In the study, which was an outgrowth of the previous Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth conducted at Gallaudet University from 1968 to 2004, school administrators (n = 48) were asked to describe the features of their early education programs for deaf children and to characterize the student populations they served. Descriptive statistics were calculated to report the results. The administrators surveyed reported that most of the children served were delayed in their language development, many of whom were extremely delayed and in need of language remediation. The data challenge the field of deaf education, especially early childhood education, in investigating the evidence-based practice that will help develop deaf and hard of hearing children to achieve their full learning potential.