Abstract:

Performance evaluation of paper and digital platforms for educational purposes has become one of the highly topical issues for scientific research over the past decades. The studies can be divided into two stages related to the process of computerization in education: at the first stage, computer technology was introduced, and at the second stage, it became widely used in the educational process. Both earlier and later studies were primarily aimed at studying the equivalence of paper and digital tasks, including performance outcomes. Today, with the enhancement of hardware and software, there is a need for further studies of changes in processing of data provided both on paper and digital platforms in the educational process.

New studies are especially important for hearing impaired students characterized mainly by visual perception of information. At technical universities, hearing impaired students operate not only with textual information, but also work with graphic data (graphs, drawings, diagrams, charts and tables). It is crucial to correctly combine both different forms of information and existing platforms to organize a productive learning process.

The study is aimed at identifying the features of perception by hearing impaired students of a technical text presented on an interactive whiteboard and printed on paper. During the study, the respondents were offered technical texts of similar complexity on two platforms. The following parameters were compared: number of times the text was read to perform specially designed tasks; number and accuracy of keywords; completeness and correctness of the key points and summaries of the text; results of a test completed a week after reading the text. The students also filled out a reflection questionnaire.

The study showed that students needed to reread the text more often on an interactive whiteboard compared to the paper version. The students coped better with selecting keywords when working with a paper text. There were no significant differences between the key points of paper and digital texts. The text summaries turned out to be more complete and correct when working with the paper text. The results of the questionnaire indicate that hearing impaired students are not able to objectively assess their capabilities.

Keywords:

Hearing impaired students, paper versus digital platforms, reading comprehension, visual perception, inclusive education.