Empirical Articles Academic Status and Progress of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in General Education Classrooms

The study participants were 197 deaf or hard-of-hearing students with mild to profound hearing loss who attended general education classes for 2 or more hours per day. We obtained scores on standardized achievement tests of math, reading, and language/writing, and standardized teacher’s ratings of academic competence annually, for 5 years, to-gether with other demographic and communication data. Results on standardized achievement tests indicated that, over the 5-year period, 63%–79 % of students scored in the average or above-average range in math, 48%–68 % in reading, and 55%–76 % in language/writing. The standard-ized test scores for the group were, on average, half an SD below hearing norms. Average student progress in each sub-ject area was consistent with or better than that made by the norm group of hearing students, and 79%–81 % of students made one or more year’s progress annually. Teachers rated 69%–81 % of students as average or above average in aca-demic competence over the 5 years. The teacher’s ratings also indicated that 89 % of students made average or above-average progress. Students ’ expressive and receptive com-munication, classroom participation, communication mode, and parental participation in school were significantly, but moderately, related to academic outcomes. This study reports on the academic status and prog-ress, over a 5-year period, of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students attending general education class-rooms in public schools. Although there is compara-tively little information on this subgroup of students, 44 % of DHH students nationally spend more than 16 hrs a week in classrooms with hearing students (Gallaudet Research Institute, 2006). In the United States, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of DHH students attending general education classrooms in the past decades, due to legislation and the growing movement toward inclusion (Stinson & Antia, 1999). With the widespread use of early identification and in-tervention (National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, 2008), many children with hearing loss are likely to develop language and communication skills within the range of their hearing peers (Yoshinaga