Designing and validation of an educational software to improve writing skills of hearingimpaired students in primary schools

Background and Aim: Hearing impairment affects educational skills of hearing-impaired students, but its negative impact is far more on reading and writing skills. This study was per-formed to design and validate an educational software to improve writing skills. Methods: In this study, the mixed-methods app-roach was used. In the first step, the qualitative method was used to design the educational soft-ware, which was based on the main themes of the conceptual model of the writing skill curri-culum provided by Sharifi et al. (2016). After-wards, quantitative method was used to validate the software. In so doing, we enrolled 31 teach-ers working in hearing-impaired special primary schools. Results: The results indicated that more than 50% of the participants approved the software in terms of objectives, content determination, appr-opriateness of time of teaching the content, app-ropriateness of the selected places related to the learning subject, diversity of techniques with regard to individual differences, variety of tech-niques to control organizational shortcomings, as well as appropriateness of the educational software for improving language skills, social relationships, as well as educational achieve-ment in all the curricular areas. Conclusion: Designing an educational software capable of considering all the influential aspects and components for writing skill improvement can improve writing skill of hearing-impaired students.