News Archive

REU internship culminates with student poster presentations

September 18, 2009

During Summer 2009, VL2 led a ten-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program for four Deaf students: Candace Myers and Jamaal Deon Johnson from Gallaudet University, Ryan Barrett from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Brittany Freel from the Rochester Institute of Technology. The students worked diligently throughout the ten-week program, learning research methods and applying these new skills to a topic of their choice related to visual language and learning. Over the course of the program, the interns designed a research study, wrote IRB proposals, collected data, conducted statistical analyses, wrote a full research paper, and designed a scientific research poster.

The REU internship culminated on August 7th, 2009 with the students presenting their research posters in the Sorenson Language and Communication Center at Gallaudet University. The students presented the following four projects: “A Comparison of ASL Skills between Deaf Native and Non-Native Signers” by Jamaal Deon Johnson, “Background and Family Characteristics and Deaf Individuals’ Language Abilities” by Brittany Freel, “The Interaction of Culture, Family Characteristics, Reading Experiences, Language, and Educational Level: Impacts on Black Deaf Individuals’ Reading Skills” by Candace Myers, and “The Impact of Linguistic Experience on the Perception of Iconicity in ASL“ by Ryan Barrett.

The poster session was well-attended by members of Gallaudet University community, members of the District of Columbia Black Deaf community, as well as two officials from the National Science Foundation. The REU interns conducted themselves as graduate researchers as they shared their findings with the audience and fielded questions and comments. The session provided an interactive learning opportunity for the students, their mentors, and the audience.

VL2 is incredibly proud of these hard-working, motivated young researchers! They are well-prepared to attend graduate school and to contribute valuable research to the field of visual language and visual learning in the near future!

The is material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number SBE-0541953. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.