ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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The Impact of Language Experience on the Development of Number Representations in Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Children

Effective Years: 2016-2023

There are approximately 80,000 school-age children who are deaf or hard of hearing in our nation's schools and these students typically lag behind their hearing classmates in mathematics achievement. There is a pressing need to ensure that these students learn mathematics and are able to advance academically with equal access to science and mathematics education. Recent research suggests that early language development affects young children's cognitive representations of numbers and their number vocabulary. A delay in language exposure, which occurs for more than 90% of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, may negatively impact number development. It is also unknown whether children who acquire sign language early in life demonstrate delayed mathematical development. This CAREER scholar will investigate how deaf or hard of hearing children, compared to hearing children, learn numbers. The research will examine how language experiences affect the development of number representations, symbols and words. Project activities will also include studies about how parents and children can be trained to impact number learning. Results of this work are expected to provide information to parents, educators and researchers about how to help deaf or hard of hearing children learn numbers for mathematical development.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-wide activity that offers awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This award is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) and Linguistics programs. ECR emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Linguistics supports basic science in the domain of human language.

The goal of this CAREER project is to develop a model of the formation and quality of number systems as related to the timing of language acquisition and language modality, with an emphasis on advancing knowledge about how deaf and hard-of-hearing children learn number representations. The basic premise is that language is needed before number concepts can be learned. Research questions include: (1) Do deaf and hard-of-hearing children who acquire American Sign Language (ASL) from birth follow the same trajectory in acquiring number knowledge as do their hearing peers? (2)Do deaf and hard-of-hearing children who are exposed to language later in life follow the same trajectory in acquiring number knowledge as do deaf and hard-of-hearing children who acquire ASL from birth? (3) Do delays in exposure to sign or spoken language affect children's ability to fluidly and automatically manipulate number representations? (4) Can explicit training with labelling and counting sets increase the number knowledge of young signing deaf and hard-of-hearing children relative to non-number training? (5) Can structured parental interactions with deaf and hard-of-hearing children, in which parents label and count sets increase the number knowledge of deaf and hard-of-hearing children relative to interactions that are not about numbers? A series of studies will be conducted to address these questions and results will be published, disseminated at professional conferences and shared with teachers via training workshops.