Several studies at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University have uncovered a potentially important cause of academic difficulties in kids: minor hearing loss, which can slip below the radar of parents and teachers alike. Research on 1,200 Tennessee kids found many cases of previously undetected hearing loss and noted that those affected had scored significantly lower on psycho-educational tests than their normal-hearing peers, or had failed at least one grade. Another study found that one-third of kids with some hearing loss in one ear had repeated grades or required extra assistance, and were 10 times more likely to encounter academic difficulties. As Anne Marie Tharpe, an associate professor in Vanderbilt’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, explains: “If children have even a slight hearing loss, they don’t have full access to the acoustics of speech.” While adults with some hearing loss can often fill in the blanks through experience, children learning new vocabulary and concepts cannot, and that impairs the learning process in class and in social interactions.
Further, kids with minimal hearing impairment often appear to hear and so are assumed to be willfully inattentive. Tharpe advocates more rigorous screening in schools to detect acoustically challenged kids, and the implementation of amplification systems such as teacher microphones.
