Visual Gaze as a Marker of Deaf Students’ Attention During Mediated Instruction

Instruction mediated through sign language interpretation has become more and more common in higher education with the growing presence deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. At the same time, it is increasingly common for instructors to augment traditional lectures with visual displays, encouraged by research demonstrating that memory and learning are enhanced by engaging multiple modalities While hearing students can take advantage of multiple, concurrent streams of information in the modern classroom, DHH students need to shift their attention rapidly between the instructor, the sign language interpreter, and the visual display. This chapter discusses two experiments that monitored the gaze of DHH and hearing students in a classroom environment that included instruction mediated through sign language. The results highlight the need for educators to consider the additional demands on DHH students in modern classrooms, especially those mediated by sign-language interpreters. Because they cannot take advantage of the same concurrent streams of information as their hearing counterparts, they must shift serially between multiple sources of information.