Arithmetic School Readinessof Preschoolerswith Hearing Impairment

Abstract

The study aimed to examine the difficulties of children with hearing impairment in acquiring arith-metic skills at the preschool stage. Two groups of children, one with hearing impairment and anoth-er who were typically developing were assessed on a ‘Pre-Arithmetic School Readiness Test’. The test that was developed as a part of the current study elicited responses for questions presented through the visual and auditory modality, for questions that required open and closed set respons-es. The findings of ANOVA, MANOVA and independent t-test indicated that the children with hear-ing impairment performed poorer than the typically developing children in three of the four sub-categories of the test (auditory-open, auditory-closed, & visual-open). The only sub-section where the children with hearing impairment performed better was the visual-closed sub-category. While the children with hearing impairment performed similar to the typically developing children on tasks involving number concepts and shapes, they performed poorer on fundamental operation of addi-tion and subtraction. The test was found to be sensitive to the difficulties of the children with hear-ing impairment in acquiring arithmetic concepts as it differentiated the performance of the two participant groups.