Arithmetic School Readiness of Preschoolers with Hearing Impairment

Year 2017, Volume: 9 Issue: 1, 34 - 49, 30.06.2017

Asha Yathiraj Gowramma Ittira Poovaiah

https://doi.org/10.20489/intjecse.330089

Abstract

The study aimed to examine
the difficulties of children with hearing impairment in acquiring arithmetic
skills at the preschool stage. Two groups of children, one with hearing
impairment and another 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 responses.
The findings of ANOVA, MANOVA and independent t-test indicated that the
children with hearing 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 addition and subtraction. The test was found
to be sensitive to the difficulties of the children with hearing impairment in
acquiring arithmetic concepts as it differentiated the performance of the two
participant groups.

Keywords

Pre-arithmetic skills, open-set performance, closed-set performanc, number concept, fundamental operation

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