Honors Theses

Date of Award

Spring 5-9-2020

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Rebecca Lowe

Second Advisor

Ying Hao

Third Advisor

John Samonds

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

Hearing loss among school-aged children is becoming increasingly prevalent (CDC, 2019). Having hearing loss in a classroom setting can negatively affect a child’s language development, academic achievement, and social communication. Educational audiology plays a vital role in the academic success of children with hearing loss by providing a full range of audiology services to students, as part of a multidisciplinary team, to facilitate listening, learning, and communication access. By performing specialized assessments, monitoring personal hearing instruments, recommending, fitting, and managing hearing assistive technology, providing support services, and advocating on behalf of students with hearing loss, educational audiologists help to bridge the academic gap between students with hearing loss and their peers. In Mississippi, however, educational audiology services are severely lacking, with only two known working educational audiologists in the state who cannot feasibly provide services to every child with hearing loss in Mississippi schools. To meet the increasing need, this pilot study establishes an educational audiology model in which both telehealth and direct educational audiology service provision are delivered to one school district within the state. As technology advances, audiologists have successfully delivered services to students remotely (Steuerwald et al., 2018, Lancaster et al., 2008, Govender & Mars, 2017), saving both parties time and resources while effectively providing necessary care to students with hearing loss. The author intends to identify a new model for educational audiology service provision which will work to serve a greater number of students with hearing loss in the state.

Accessibility Status

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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