Strategic and Interactive Signing Instruction

Conditions

• Sign Language Skills
• Teaching Behaviors

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

4 Years - 99 Years

Healthy Volunteers

Not accepted

Interventions

• Strategic and Interactive Signing Instruction — BEHAVIORAL
  SISI centers on deaf children producing sign language compositions to communicate their messages with identified audiences, and teachers utilizing strategic and interactive approaches to bring attention to target sign language skills by consciously monitoring and manipulating language to create desired meanings grounded in socially shared understandings.

Study Details

Strategic and interactive approaches driven by sociocultural, cognitive, and language theories have accumulated a large body of evidence documenting improvements in more complex oral and written language skills. Growing evidence demonstrates that more complex sign language skills positively predict literacy skills and may lead to improved health outcomes. This project involves new applications of theory-driven strategic and interactive approaches in an intervention program to target sign language development in deaf children between 5 and 8 years old who are at high risk of language delays.

Key Dates

Start date

Aug 23, 2024

Status verified

Oct 2024

Primary completion

Jun 30, 2026

Completion

Dec 30, 2026

Study Design

Enrollment

150 participants (estimated)

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

CROSSOVER

Primary purpose

PREVENTION

Arms

• Experimental: Improving Teacher Fidelity to SISI
  A noncurrent multiple baseline design across teacher participants will be utilized to assess the extent of support required by teachers to become proficient in SISI implementation. In this study, the independent variable is the SISI training, and the dependent variable is teacher fidelity to the SISI program as measured by the SISI fidelity checklist.
• Experimental: Control and Experimental Groups: SISI Efficacy
  This pre- and post- study provides baseline data on deaf children's sign language development prior to receiving SISI. Additionally, each participating teacher will submit a recorded instructional unit showcasing their best methods for supporting sign language development. This provides a further layer of baseline analysis, allowing the PI to assess the instructional methods already in use prior to SISI professional development and implementation. Demographic data for both teachers and students will also be collected in preparation for the quasi-experiment study. Then, teachers will be assigned to either an experimental group, which will receive SISI professional development, or a control group that will continue with their usual teaching practices. In this quasi-experiment study, SISI's efficacy will be evaluated by comparing outcomes between the two groups.
• Experimental: Pre- and Post- Descriptive Study Data of Language Outcomes Children
  Up to 40 children from 4 classes will provide pre- and post-data in which they respond to a prompt in sign language on video.
• Experimental: Single Case Research Design: Deaf Children's Language Growth
  Single case research design will provide robust day-to-day data of causal relations between SISI and sign language skills. Given teachers' high fidelity in SISI implementation, a noncurrent multiple baseline design across child participants will be applied to assess the extent of SISI improving deaf children's target sign language skills in a year. The independent variable of this study is the SISI implementation, which is used to improve the dependent variables which will be target sign language skills.

Primary Outcome Measure

Sign Language Skills [ Time Frame: From enrollment to the end of treatment 9 academic months later. ]

Locations (1)

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