Inside the rochester institute of technology’s Latest Mission to center the Deaf Viewpoint

Early last month, Susan Murad wrote for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s website about how researchers at RIT, as the New York-based institution is colloquially known, soon will “use eye-tracking to show how deafness impacts vocabulary knowledge and reading as well as how deaf and hard-of-hearing children, who have historically shown lower than average reading outcomes, develop into highly skilled readers.” The research project is largely made possible by way of a not-insignificant lift from a $500,000 grant provided by the venerable National Institutes of Health, or NIH.

According to Murad’s story, RIT’s research is led by Dr. Frances Cooley, an assistant professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf’s Department of Liberal Studies. Dr. Cooley, who leads the school’s Reading and Deafness Lab, and team, Murad reported, are examining “how vocabulary knowledge in American Sign Language supports English reading development” [as well as] “how first-language knowledge shapes second-language reading comprehension and eye-movement control.” The team’s findings will “have important implications for theories of reading development and for educational practices that support bilingual learners,” according to Murad.

Fast-forward to mid-December and I had the opportunity to sit down virtually with Dr. Cooley to discuss the work by her and her team. She explained the root of her interest in deafness and reading comprehension traces back to an article she came across while doing graduate work that said the average Deaf person reads at a fourth grade level. Such a sobering statistic bothered Dr. Cooley, she told me, largely because “[it] said to me we’re not doing something in our educational practices to allow deaf students to thrive.” As such, the knowledge motivated her to begin looking into why reading levels amongst Deaf people are so low; she wanted to better understand Deaf people and how exactly they read, along with a deep dive into groups of Deaf readers. In particular, Dr. Cooley was keenly interested in who had early access to ASL versus those who didn’t.

“When we look at those who had early access to American Sign Language, we actually see these incredible differences that are beneficial for Deaf readers,” Dr. Cooley said. “They are actually more efficient. They read faster. They skip more words, and this doesn’t actually negatively impact their comprehension. This is particularly interesting because they’re technically second language users of English, and most second language users are going to be less efficient in their second language, but these Deaf readers are even more efficient than a typically hearing monolingual reader.”

She continued: “I really got excited about this strengths-based approach to understanding what a successful Deaf reader does, and I wanted to be able to translate that into educational practices so that all Deaf readers can thrive. I really think moving away from a focus on what people can’t do and transitioning that to what they can do is really beneficial in a bunch of different ways. Eye-tracking—I love to say your eyes are your best way to point your brain at different things—we don’t really have any other way to point our brains at things, so if we’re looking at the eye movements, we can get really fine-grained information about what people are doing when they’re actually reading. I think that’s much more interesting than having someone read a sentence or read a paragraph and answer questions about it, because that involves a whole bunch of other processes like memory, and to me, that’s less interesting to me. It’s still important, but what people are actually doing as their eyes move across a sentence can tell us so much about the underlying processes of what their brains are actually interested in [when they] successfully extract language from text.”

In a sentence, Dr. Cooley said all this highfalutin eye-tracking tech and subsequent research is meant to “establish how a Deaf child uses their first language ASL skills.”

Asked to expound on her goals, she replied thusly: “I’m looking primarily at Deaf children who had early access to sign language: either they have Deaf, signing parents or they have hearing parents who made an effort to learn sign language early. Then these kids go to bimodal, bilingual schools, so they’re really depending on their ASL skills to learn to read English. I really want to know how, from a bilingualism perspective, how that first language access and having a strong first language can benefit the ability for these children to learn a second language, which is English or any other ambient language in a community, by exploiting their first language skills. We see this in hearing populations. We see this all the time. Bilingualism is the norm in most countries around the world, bilingual or multilingualism. If we understand a Deaf child signer as a developing bilingual child, and we think about the aspects of their first language and how that can help them learn their second language more successfully, we’re getting a more appropriate and equitable snapshot of this minority population.”

When asked about the technical component involved with eye-tracking, Dr. Cooley said the device she uses is mounted atop a desk with a laptop behind it such that a child can sit normally and read what’s on screen. The tracker then uses a painless, undetectable infrared light to the subject’s eyes, which is reflected and travels back to the computer. The reflected light contains data into where the child’s eyes are positioned while reading—all of it in real time. “Based on what we already know about how readers use information to read, we can then look at Deaf readers in this paradigm,” Dr. Cooley said.

She further noted there exists “a really big body of research” centered on eye movements and reading, adding it’s only been recently, in the last 20–30 years, that Deaf people, especially Deaf signers, have been included in these kinds of studies. The richer inclusion meant, Dr. Cooley said, researchers have been able to learn a lot more about how everybody, Deaf or not, “[uses] their eyes to extract language from text.”

As someone with low vision who, incidentally, has struggled with eye-tracking on things like Face ID and Apple Vision Pro, I asked Dr. Cooley how nimble her tracker device is. Her answer? Not very. The technology she currently uses assumes what she described as “your most typical eye differences,” emphasizing the tracker works “just fine” with aids like contact lenses and glasses. Beyond that, however, she “said the team is “unfortunately” excluding people who have ocular motor conditions (like yours truly) not out of maliciousness, but out of a desire to “be certain that what these kids are doing with their eyes is reflective of what their brains are trying to do.” Dr. Cooley went on to tell me people with lazy eye, medically known as strabismus, are excluded because their eyes can’t always point to where their brain wants to focus. This weakness, technologically anyway, is crucial because Dr. Cooley’s tracker relies upon an algorithm to function. She hopes to improve the algorithm over time such as to accommodate more types of readers, but that, she said with humility, is beyond her ken. Nonetheless, it is something very important to her that gets addressed as time goes on.

“If we’re not capturing the cognition of every single population of people, I don’t think we’re really capturing cognition—and that includes people with differences in their eye shapes and people with differences in how they use their vision,” Dr. Cooley said. “But at this point, it’s easier to start with the most traditional eye move [and] eye shape because it’s just easier to draw the conclusions we need. But [accommodating visual disabilities] is an important thing to think about. It’s just currently not one of my goals.”

At a more personal level, Dr. Cooley’s ties to deafness and the community are tight. She’s married to a Deaf person and has been a self-described “second language signer” for close to 16 years, telling me she likes to think of herself as being “pretty involved” with the Deaf community. Despite her horn’s toots, though, Dr. Cooley readily acknowledges the “positionality” as a hearing person in a hearing-dominated world. On the eye-tracking project, she explained there are consultants who help the researchers with not only data collection, but also informing with best practices when working with Deaf children so as to not be “triggering.” This is a key point, Dr. Cooley said, because a lot of Deaf people cope with what she termed “educational trauma,” so RIT’s goal is to avoid said triggers and instead be as “Deaf-friendly” as possible. Still, a significant number of people have reached out to Dr. Cooley and team to express their appreciation for going after the insights they’re trying to glean from their research.

“There’s a great need for this type of information. I think practitioners need it. There’s a lot of information out there about what is most important for a deaf child,” Dr. Cooley said. “One of the biggest arguments that can be made for an oral approach—avoiding sign language and instead making sure a Deaf child is able to speak and read lips and use hearing devices—one of the biggest arguments for that is they won’t be able to learn to read, or will be far less successful in learning to read if they can’t associate sounds with letters. I think that isn’t actually representative of what most Deaf people can do. If you look at Deaf signers, they have this incredibly rich and robust language; most Deaf people will talk about how they use their signing to help read to their children… they sign along with the book, and so their children are exposed to both print and sign. If we can take advantage of these things, I think we can not only make a Deaf child reader more successful, but also feel a little bit better about themselves and not feel like who they are and how they happen to be born is going to make them unable to do something. I think anybody should be able to do anything, and if our educational practices are not well-researched or not founded in research, we can’t know for sure they’re the best practices. It’s pretty clear, given the wide variability in reading outcomes for a lot of Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, that there’s something we don’t know, or there’s something that some people are doing better than others. We just we have to test it and see what’s going on to actually be able to make a difference.”

She added: “All of the conversations I’ve had with people, they’ve all been extremely positive. I think education experts, the people who are actually teaching children in the schools, policy makers, early intervention specialists, everybody wants some type of research that can really be used to show ‘Hey, ASL is not detrimental to your Deaf child, it’s actually going to be beneficial. Here is one of the ways that it’s beneficial.’ I have a lot of people reach out to me and asking for these resources and ask for papers that show American Sign Language is only beneficial for Deaf children learning to read.”

At its core, RIT’s work is ultimately about centering the Deaf point of view.

“I always say, if we actually listened to Deaf adults, a lot of this research might not be necessary,” Dr. Cooley said. “They’ve been telling us for years and years and years that ASL is so incredibly important for so many different reasons, but we need the research. Someone has to do it, and I’m so privileged I get to do it. And I love, love [doing] this work… it makes me excited! It feels like a privilege to be doing what I’m doing.”

Dr. Cooley spoke effusively about being based in Rochester and the city’s sizable Deaf presence. (In fact, this very piece is not my first rodeo with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, having covered the Sign Speak app in September 2024.) She said it’s typical for those in cognitive science to choose the path of least resistance when it comes to recruiting people to participate in studies like hers. Naturally, the Deaf community is a smaller populace, even in Rochester, so it’s “going to take a little bit more effort” to get folks into the lab. But the payoff is worth it; Dr. Cooley told me her troops have fostered a tight relationship with Rochester’s School for the Deaf. She told me the school is a K–12, bimodal and bilingual institution for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Because of proximity, both geographically and logistically, Dr. Cooley said her staff actually finds it “not too difficult” to hook up with interested parents and others. And Rochester isn’t the end-all, be-all either; Dr. Cooley said her team has similar positive relationships spanning the country, from Texas to Indiana and beyond.

“Because of those relationships, we aren’t nearly as concerned with the data collection as somebody else without those relationships would be,” she said. “It’ll definitely take longer to run this type of research than it would take to run this type of study with hearing children because there are fewer concentrated pockets of these readers.”

Looking towards the future, Dr. Cooley hopes to forge “stronger partnerships” with experts across various disciplines, people who oftentimes exist on “in their own little silos.” Without these cross-collaboration, there’s too much navel-gazing and not nearly enough advancing in understanding the world, and the people who inhabit it, better.

“I really hope in the future, we’re able to get to a point where we can directly meet the needs of all children, not just Deaf and hard-of-hearing children—all children who have varied needs in terms of their ability to read and write,” Dr. Cooley said in looking into the proverbial crystal ball. “In the current day and age, if you can’t read and write, your ability in an academic or professional field is going to be pretty limited. I think being able to meet the needs of all of our children so they can be fully functional and fully capable adults is the goal. I really hope my research can start bringing us towards that.”