Considering the conceptual problems of engineering education, it is important to note that engineering activity is, in fact, a project activity, the basis for which is the ability to find a non-standard approach to solve any complexity of production tasks. Innovative specificity of a Bachelor’s or Master’s level specialist becomes fruitful when it is based on fundamental education, a powerful layer of interdisciplinary knowledge, a system of high responsibility and quality of project implementation.
Due to the system of “permanent” integration, “environmental” influence of University culture and a unique complex of rehabilitative measures the initial heterogeneity of student’s composition (initial level of knowledge within school programs, individual cognitive abilities, effectiveness of auditory correction and motivation for professional education) is “ground up” and leads to the general level of professional competence in accordance with the state educational standards.
Deaf and hard of hearing students, due to objective reasons, face problems specific to them, which are partially or completely absent in their well hearing peers. First of all, these include problems of functional nature related to individual communicative abilities and the level of adaptation to the learning environment:
Specific psychophysiological features that arise in deaf and hard of hearing children as “secondary and tertiary defects” and persist into old age;
the factor of organic hearing limitation in hearing-impaired children and adolescents, resulting from 2 main reasons: full maturation of auditory brain structures occurs at age 15 and older, and lack of language and life experience.
Students
Facilitating the perception of the acoustic signal (receiving and processing sensory information), turning it into meaningful sensations, concepts, ideas, is the process of translating the “passive” sense of “hearing” into the “active” skill of “listening”, which is the basis for the skill “understanding”, and should be the basis of (re)habilitative tactics.
The use of modern hearing aids and cochlear implants has been proven to compensate to varying degrees for hearing loss in hearing-impaired students, significantly improving the quality of speech perception. However, the speech comprehension score, which is critical to the comprehension process, remains lower for the majority of these students than for their normal-hearing peers. Extensive research has confirmed that hearing aid and cochlear implant users, as well as individuals with minimal hearing loss, have the most difficulty in noisy environments.