expert update

Just to make fill in the blog with the rest of my expert experience....

I exchanged a couple more emails after initially speaking to David Zajac. He told me that he feels the worst part about a speech impairment is lowered self esteem while the worst part of hearing loss is social isolation. The two often go hand in hand since "we basically speak the way we hear" and these individuals cannot hear well. He also stated that "profoundly deaf individuals often have limited speech, thus the social isolation".

I tried to talk to an educational expert on campus like suggested by Corrinne. However, that was even more pointless than the first interview since the health professionals on campus focus on college students opposed to the children I am researching in my paper. I got mainly general information that I already had before. I should have talked to someone who deals with younger kids but time did not permit this.

So I guess overall I was not a big fan of the expert interview since I have such a narrow topic that it is hard to get in contact with someone who directly researches with what I am researching.

research

I've been going over a lot of what people had to say on Poster Day. A lot of the comments really helped and let me know about the holes I had in my explanations and research. I think I have finally accepted the fact that my topic is quite narrow, and if I can make sure I have enough information to write a well-supported paper I will. It is amazing how many sources I have consulted and am taking such little pieces of information out of most of them.

Expert

As my expert, I is talked to David Zajac a professor in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences here at UNC. He has earned a PhD in Communication Disorders, a Masters in Speech Pathology/Audiology , and a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology from the University of Pittsburg. He focuses on speaking with craniofacial abnormalities.

He informed me that the most common cause of hearing impairment from birth is OME. I have found a lot of research on OME, and I am thinking about narrowing my topic even more to focus only on this condition. However overall, I am not sure this expert interview was that enlightening. He reaffirmed most of my research, but since he is not a specialist in education or children I did not learn as much as I hoped. I think I am going to conduct a second expert interview with someone in the education field, and hopefully between the two interviews and study fields I can shed more light on my research.

reflection/ random thought

So Leo, I just read one of your posts again where you commented on how we have to be constantly evaluating our research questions and data, and how we must be reformulating more questions and directions for research by fitting in our new material with all the rest with connections. (At least it was something like that.) And I guess I wanted to say that I guess I know what you are talking about now (since my research hasn't been exactly linear, and I am constantly redefining my research and direction), because until recently I thought that was crazy talk. I guess I'm learning something.

even more

I just realized that I haven't formally changed my topic. I've been researching children with hearing disorders and their educational development though I have not officially changed my topic. I started to write a new prospectus with "How do hearing disorders affect a child’s educational development?" as my main question and as my pulling questions "How can children learn the best without hearing?" and "How do children learn how to speak and listen?" which aren't really changed. I don't think we really need to write another prospectus, but I find it helps me focus my research and give me more thought and reflection on the process of data analysis and retrieval that I'm going through.
I'm also completing some more annotated bibliographies in order assist my researching thought process.

more research

So I am researching even more. I have become quick adept at the whole subject search on the UNC site.
The problem I'm having right now is that some of my information in contradictory. One study states that there are major differences in language acquisition and the others don't claim these differences are significant. I am inclined to believe in the majority of these studies, but I'm not sure how to explain the one.
I would also like to comment once again on how strange I think it is that having a hearing disorder doesn't really horribly affect one's learning ability and educational goals. Human adaptability is amazing.

update

So my research is progressing quite nicely though I am still a bit worried that I am missing the whole point of this assignment. I have read over parts of the book I picked up at the library during my research session with the library. The main problem is that it focuses a lot of parents and what they can do to help their child. So it has a lot of the information I need though it is written for a different audience. I have been able to pick out a lot of the information I need.
I haven't been using as many online resources as I should. I really need to start to parse all this information and get stuff into a workable format. However, I will probably wait to do that until later. I just need to research even more.