The Parents' Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children (PEACH) scale: normative data

The Parent's Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children (PEACH) was developed to evaluate the effectiveness of amplification for infants and children with hearing impairment by a systematic use of parents' observations. The PEACH was administered to 180 parents (one parent of each of 90 children with normal hearing that ranged in age from 0.25 to 46 months, and 90 children with hearing impairment that ranged in age from 4 months to 19 years). The internal consistency reliability was 0.88, and the test-retest correlation was 0.93. Normative data are presented to enable performance of children with hearing impairment to be related to their normally hearing peers and/or other children with similar degrees of hearing loss. Ninety and ninety-five percent critical differences are presented to facilitate evaluation of differences between scores obtained under different conditions for the same individual. The PEACH can be used with infants as young as one month old and with school-aged children who have hearing loss ranging from mild to profound degree.