Hausar Kurma: Development and Evaluation of Interactive Mobile App for the English-Hausa Sign Language Alphabet

Abstract

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a mobile app named “Hausar Kurma” in teaching English to Hausa-speaking hearing impairment students in Nigerian special schools. A single-subject design was used to evaluate the impact of the application. Evidence-based practices were employed to assess the performance of the educational tool and to ensure compliance with the gold standard. Various single-subject design methods, including the celeration line, binomial test, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test, were used. A sample of ten primary school students selected from a special education school was used in this study. A pretest examination was conducted, followed by eight weeks of training using the developed mobile app, and a posttest examination was carried out. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of evidence-based research for evaluating educational tools and their efficacy in special education. A higher number of data points above the celeration line indicated a significant improvement in participants’ academic performance. Additionally, the binomial test conducted after a 95% confidence interval yielded a probability of 0.0098, indicating a noteworthy enhancement in student performance. At the same time, a Wilcoxon signed rank test conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 27 on the pretest and posttest data yielded an effect size of 0.633, indicating a strong Cohen’s large effect classification. Similarly, the usability test conducted indicated a higher acceptance rate of the application by the users. The results of this study confirm the utility of the app and recommend its implementation in special schools to enhance English language instruction for hearing impairment and hard-of-hearing Hausa-speaking students in special education institutions.

Keywords

• Special education
• hearing impairment students
• English language teaching
• Hausa sign language
• primary school