Cognitive skills assessment in deaf and hard of hearing school children

Globally, 466 million (5%) are having hearing disability of which 34 million are children. In India, 63 million people (6.3%) suffer from significant auditory loss. Cognitive abilities in deaf children have been assessed in the past and have shown incongruous results, with some finding that IQ (intelligence quotient) is same in the deaf population and the normal population and some have shown IQ to be less in deaf population. There are however hardly few Indian studies done in this context. Hence, the current study was aimed to assess cognitive skills in deaf and hard of hearing school children using Bhatia's Battery of Performance Test.

It was a cross-sectional comparative study; 52 deaf and hard of hearing children and 52 normal children of same age group without hearing or speech impairment from 5^th grade onward up to 8^th grade were included in the study, and the study was approved by IEC. Bhatia's battery of performance test, which is one of the nonverbal intelligence tests was used to asses cognition in both the groups, the t test was used to compare the differences in the scores between 2 groups.

The mean age of the study population was 12.9 ± 1.12 years, whereas controls were 12.86 ± 1.20. There were 26 boys and 24 girls in each group. Scores of the tests were statistically (P < 0.005) higher in the study group in comparison with the control group. IQ & PQ scores were significantly higher in the study group when compared to the control group.

The results show that deaf and hard of hearing children have an IQ almost similar in fact statistically better than their normal counterpart; this could help the families of these children to move out of the shadow of stigma associated with the disability and provide an opportunity to be trained like their normal counterparts.