By Yishane Lee
It’s hard to hear well in school. Between the hard surfaces, open spaces such as gyms and cafeterias, air filters and/or air conditioners, and students themselves who can be counted on not to be quiet all the time, it’s a challenge for children with hearing loss as well as typical hearing children to always be able to fully hear and understand what’s being said in the classroom.
Credit: @CDC/Unsplash
Sound and communication expert Julian Treasure says children sitting in the fourth row of a classroom lose as much of half of what is being said.
“Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever,” Treasure says in his TED Talk on why architects need to use their ears. “On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group. Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language.”
Fortunately, there are ways students can hear better in school. As part of learning self advocacy—a lifelong skill—a student who has a hearing loss can ask to sit in front of the classroom and not too close to the air filters or air conditioning or other noisy machinery. They should also always have extra hearing aid batteries on hand.
A student with a hearing loss can ask their teachers to use assistive technology such as an FM system. The teacher wears a microphone around their neck that transmits wirelessly directly to the student’s hearing device.
There are also “sound field” systems such as Redcat that amplify the teacher’s voice throughout the classroom using a microphone and a flat panel sound receiver. Everyone in the classroom can benefit from a system like this, especially as it helps even when the teacher is facing away from the students.
Consider auditory training programs that can help your student hear better in noise. A study in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America found that auditory training boosted speech understanding in schoolchildren with hearing loss by 50 percent, a result that lasted even three months after the study concluded. The training involved practicing the comprehension of speech in the presence of “interrupted” white noise—white noise with brief silences.
Older students with smartphones can try using live AI transcription apps such as Otter.ai to capture speech and turn it into text that can be saved, highlighted, and shared. While these programs aren’t exact, they can be a good backup for capturing speech and taking notes.
Part of self advocacy is learning how to talk about your hearing loss with peers. Try using questions about a hearing aid or cochlear implant as a learning opportunity, as Ashton has been doing since elementary school.
Here’s to a successful, normal school year!
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These findings support the idea that comprehension challenges can stem from cognitive limitations besides language structure. For educators and clinicians, this suggests that sentence comprehension measures can provide insights into children’s cognitive strengths and areas that need support.