Teachers' Knowledge of the Relationship of Auditory Acuity and Hearing Impairment to Reading.

Abstract

Teachers and specialists were tested to determine whether they would demonstrate similar knowledge about and attitudes toward auditory acuity, the hearing impaired, and reading. There were ten adult representatives in each of the following six subgroups: primary teachers, regular teachers of the learning disabled, teachers of the hearing impaired, and speech and language pathologists. A fifty-two item multiple-choice test, An Assessment of Teacher Knowledge of Hearing Impairment and Reading, designed by the researcher, assessed teachers' and specialists' knowledge about auditory acuity, hearing impairment, reading, and attitudes. Demographic data were also gathered and included in the instrument. Raw scores were used in the statistical analyses on the test and demographic data. An independent samples t-test and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to determine significant differences. The results showed that specialists were more knowledgeable than classroom teachers. Communications specialists--teachers of the hearing impaired and speech and language pathologists--were better informed than the other four subgroups. Teachers of the hearing impaired were superior to all five other subgroups on knowledge about auditory acuity and hearing impairment. In conclusion, regular education teachers do not know much about the basic concepts of auditory acuity, hearing impairment and reading; and they were inadequately prepared to teach the hearing impaired in the regular classrooms. The study documents the immediate need for much more inservice training for teachers who work with hearing-impaired children in regular classrooms or remedial reading situations. It also offers a number of specific recommendations and suggestions for teaching the hearing impaired in the regular classrooms.