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$20 Million Grant Will Help Colleges Support Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

About a third of the funding will go to technology research and support.

Texas education researchers will spend the next five years helping students who are deaf or hard of hearing succeed in college by teaching their institutions how to support them, thanks to a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. About a third of the grant will go specifically toward assistive technology research.

This technology piece of the research will help faculty and disability offices identify the best tools that students can use in different situations to support their learning, said Stephanie Cawthon, an educational psychology associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and director of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Institute at the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. Cawthon will be leading a new National Center on Postsecondary Outcomes funded by the grant that will launch in January 2017, and Meadows Center Project Manager Carrie Lou Garberoglio will be the co-principal investigator on the project.

For Cawthon, this issue is personal. She is hard of hearing and has spent her career studying access to education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. 

As colleges try to support these students, they face a major challenge with the speech-to-text technology that transcribes spoken words into written words. Now that professors are changing the way they teach, students may be in a variety of lectures, interactive discussions and small group learning situations throughout their education career. 

"That's what's valued in a lot of the innovative teaching approaches, so it's a big deal," Cawthon said.

At the same time, colleges have to figure out how to provide access to education for each deaf or hard-of-hearing student in all of these situations, which is not as simple as it used to be when the technology would just listen to one voice lecture the entire time, Cawthon said. The research at the new center could help colleges identify tools that work well in each of these situations and help them understand when to use them.

Along with research, the center will have a live help desk open online most of the time so that colleges can ask questions and get support. It will also post downloadable resources on its website.