Patrick Rosenburg, a doctoral candidate in Language & Literacy, has been named the inaugural recipient of Ann S. Ferren Research Fund in Education Award. Rosenburg’s research examines how Deaf students learn to read.

The Ferren Research Fund provides support for the research efforts of a graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in education. Awards are given to students nearing completion of their dissertation, who are pursuing the goal of publishing a joint scholarly article or presenting at a conference under the guidance of a faculty mentor, and with a preference for students focusing on secondary education curriculum and instruction.

“Increasingly, in the classroom, and even in the social context, we see a lot of use of ASL videos that are disseminated on social media,” says Rosenburg. “So I was curious as to what happens to Deaf children who are perceiving ASL texts, whether or not they understand ASL stories, and if there are any specific skills that are required to take in that text visually. So my dissertation is really an exploration of this new arena as it relates to comprehension skills through ASL text.”

The paper Rosenburg plans to write with the support of this award will address the need for assessments of higher-level comprehension skills in older Deaf children. “Patrick’s work is critical to our understanding of how Deaf students learn to read as ASL-English bilingual learners,” says Amy Lieberman, who is Rosenburg’s graduate advisor at BU Wheelock. “By expanding our definition of ‘text’ to include rich ASL narratives, Patrick’s study illustrates that students with rich text comprehension in ASL have higher English reading scores”

“There are currently no ASL tests that examine complex language skills like drawing inferences about narrative and informative texts in ASL. His dissertation will fill this gap, and help us understand the skills that are necessary to understand academic ASL, and whether children leverage during English text comprehension,” says Naomi Caselli, who was one of Rosenburg’s dissertation readers. “As Patrick nears completion of his doctorate training, he has become one of a very small number of deaf scholars in the world.”