Educational support for hearing-impaired children with developmental disabilities

Abstract

In a survey conducted by the Japanese Ministry of Education (2002) it was reported that 6.3% of all elementary and middle school students have difficulties qualifying as developmental disabilities. Research on deaf children with developmental disabilities has been inadequate, however, and therefore I investigated the number of deaf children with developmental disabilities. I sent out questionnaires to all schools for the deaf in Japan. The results revealed that 30.0% of students had difficulties in learning, 9.1% had attention deficit, and 4.6% had obsessive-compulsive behavior and interpersonal relationship problems. These percentages were higher than those for normal-hearing students. All questions were grouped based on factor analysis, and the children were clusteranalyzed according to their factor scores. As a result, 6 distinct groups were found in elementary schools for the deaf. Here I introduced educational support for two typical cases in each cluster. The task that lies ahead is to develop effective methods to aid each group type determined by this study.