Abstracts - Earli

integration. Inclusion skills ranked high were team work and interpersonal interaction skills.Ranked low were skills for curricular and material adaptation and behavior management skills.Teachers expressed a need for training in areas as: principles of inclusion, identification andassessment, and characteristics of students with low incidence disabilities. Experience, training,and certification type were related to teacher attitudes and to their perceptions. Implications forteacher education are discussed.Using deaf children’s visual skills to promote mathematics learning: An early intervention projectPeter Bryant, Oxford Brookes University, United KingdomTerezinha Nunes, Oxford University, United KingdomDiana Burman, Oxford University, United KingdomDaniel Bell, Oxford University, United KingdomDeborah Evans, Oxford University, United KingdomDarcy Hallett, Oxford University, United KingdomDeaf students leave school with a level of mathematical competence that seriously interferes withtheir future prospects. As there is no evidence for an inbuilt difficulty with mathematics amongdeaf people (Zarfaty et al, 2004; Bull et al, 2006), the potential for early identification ofdifficulties and intervention is considerable. An important longitudinal predictor of mathematicslearning, shown to be independent of intelligence (Stern, 2006; Nunes et al, 2006), is theunderstanding of the inverse relation between addition and subtraction – or "inversion". Measuresof children’s understanding of inversion assess whether they realise that a+b–b=a. We investigateddeaf children’s understanding of inversion in two studies. In Study 1, 19 deaf children werecompared to 98 hearing children in their first year of school. Deaf children were significantlybehind their hearing peers in inversion. In Study 2, we developed and assessed an intervention topromote deaf children’s understanding of inversion. Participants (N=18) were randomly assignedto an intervention group or a control group. Both groups participated in a pre-test, an immediatepost-test and a delayed post-test, which contained inversion tasks and control items (assessingcomputation skills). They also participated in two individual sessions with a researcher, wherethey received teaching on a number-related concept: the intervention group’s teaching was aboutinversion and the control groups’ about a different concept. We expected the intervention group toimprove significantly more on the inversion tasks but not on the control items. The interventiongroup’s performance on inversion improved significantly across assessments; the control group’sdid not. The difference in improvement between the groups was significant for the inversion butnot for the control items. This study illustrates how early diagnosis and effective educationalinterventions could improve deaf children’s mathematics learning.Deaf students’ use of morphology in reading and writingTerezinha Nunes, University of Oxford, United KingdomDiana Burman, University of Oxford, United KingdomDeborah Evans, University of Oxford, United KingdomDaniel Bell, University of Oxford, United KingdomAdelina Gardner, University of Oxford, United KingdomDarcy Hallett, University of Oxford, Department of Educational St, United KingdomLearning English literacy is a great challenge for congenitally, profoundly deaf students, who donot have the range of experiences with sounds necessary for using letter-sound correspondencesaccurately. However, written English represents through letters not only sounds but alsomorphemes, which are basic units of meaning: for example, the word "magician", which seems– 88 –