Educating Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing: Overview

When a child has a hearing loss during the developmental years, all areas of development can be affected significantly. A hearing loss limits ease of acquisition of a communication system, which further influences development of interactions with others, the ability to make sense out of the world, and ease of acquiring academic skills. Early identification of a hearing loss is critical to a child's academic and emotional adjustment. What is a hearing loss, and how is it caused?

There are three major types of hearing losses. The first is called a conductive loss. This occurs when something goes wrong with the outer or middle ear, impeding sound waves from being conducted or carried to the inner ear. The second type of loss is called a sensorineural loss and occurs when damage to the inner ear or the auditory nerve impedes the sound message from being sent to the brain. The third type is referred to as a central auditory processing disorder because, although there is no specific damage to the ear itself, the neural system involved in understanding what is heard is impaired. Children with central auditory processing disorder may have normal hearing as measured by an audiometer (device used to test hearing levels), but they often have difficulty understanding what they hear. A child may also have a combination of these forms of hearing loss (Easterbrooks & Baker-Hawkins, 1994).

Many terms are used to refer to the population of individuals who have difficulty hearing. The word "deaf" by federal definition means a hearing loss which adversely affects educational performance and which is so severe that the child is impaired in processing linguistic (communication) information through hearing, with or without amplification (hearing aids). The term "hard of hearing" means a hearing loss, whether permanent or fluctuating, that adversely affects a child's educational performance but which allows the child access to some degree of communication with or without amplification (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 1990). The term "Deaf" used with a capital D refers to those individuals with hearing losses who identify themselves with the Deaf Culture. These individuals view themselves as a population united by a common heritage, a shared experience, a multi-generational history, and a language, American Sign Language (ASL) (Padden & Humphries, 1988).

The term "hearing-impaired" is used inconsistently around the country today. Some use it to mean all degrees of hearing loss while others use it to refer to the hard-of-hearing population. The terms "deaf mute" and "deaf and dumb" are antiquated. Not only are they seen as outdated, they are also viewed as offensive.

How many people have hearing losses?

The National Center for Health Statistics (Adams & Benson, 1992) estimated that more than 22.5 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. Of these individuals, 1,053,000 were under 18 years of age. This means that one of every six children has diminished hearing to some degree at any given point in time (Berg, 1986). Schildroth and Hotto (1994) reported results of demographic information on 48,300 children identified as having hearing losses. The students in their research represented 60-65% of the number reported by the federal Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), U.S. Department of Education. The vast number of individuals with hearing losses are hard of hearing or are older adults who have lost their hearing.