Using an Expert System to Study the Classroom Placement Decision for Students Who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing

Abstract

This study applies expert systems technology to the problem of deciding whether to place deaf & hard-of-hearing children in mainstream or self-contained classrooms. This application includes: (a) developing a theoretical model of how experts make placement decisions, (b) creating a computer-based expert system to capture this model and to aid teachers and other members of the individualized educational plan committee (IEPC) in the making these decisions, and (c) conducting an empirical study comparing the placement decisions of the human experts with those of the expert system. The study provides a review of the theoretical model, describes the expert system in some detail and briefly summarizes those aspects of the study related to evaluation of the expert system. In the study, ten teachers made placement decisions for ten representative student-cases. A simulation experiment was run by presenting the same ten cases to the expert system. The decisions of the expert system were found to agree with those of a majority of teachers in 90% of the cases. This and other results indicate the value of expert systems in deaf education.