An Instrument for Assessment of Social-Emotional Adjustment in Hearing-Impaired Preschoolers

An Instrument for Assessment of SocialEmotional Adjustment in Hearing-Impaired Preschoolers Kathryn P. Meadow The Education for AU Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-142) mandated individualized educational planning for every handicapped child in the United States (Federal Register, 1977). These plans were to be based on assessments of children's current status in all areas of development important to school placement and programming. The law also required that assessment instruments be validated for the particular group being evaluated. In response to this requirement, and because no instruments had been developed or normed for hearing-impaired students in the area of social and emotional adjustment, an inventory for teachers to use was developed for deaf students ages 7 to 21. This inventory is described in a manual (Meadow, Karchmer, Petersen, & Rudner , 1980) with norms based on responses from teachers of more than 2,000 deaf students. The instrument to be described in this paper, a socialemotional adjustment inventory for hearingimpaired students ages 3 to 6, is an extension of the first inventory. Like that instrument, it is designed for use by teachers or others who have lengthy and intensive opportunities for observing the behavior of young children with hearing impairments. Efforts were made to include items describing actual behaviors so that few inferences about children's motivations would be necessary. DEVELOPMENT OF INVENTORY ITEMS The inventory contains 49 items, reduced from the 70 included in the research edition through which normative data were collected. The inventory for older deaf students was used as the base for the preschool instrument. Individual consultations were held with the teachers in the preschool department of the Kendall Demonstration Elementary School to discuss the relDr . Meadow is a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Studies in Education and Human Development, Gallaudet College Research Institute. evance of those items to their students. Some items were modified to increase their appropriateness , some were deleted, and others were added. The resulting set of items was reviewed by a panel of experts in preschool deaf education and the psychology of deafness. Responses were received from 34 professionals with various kinds of training and experience: 6 preschool teachers, 11 psychologists, 3 psychiatrists, 3 audiologists, 4 social workers or counselors, and 7 administrators of preschool programs for deaf children. On the basis of extensive comments from this group, a revised set of items was developed and sent to a smaller subset of interested persons. The 70 items in the research edition of the inventory resulted from rewriting items in that second draft. Selection of Programs for Participation in Normative Data Collection With the purpose of recruiting a geographically representative group of preschool programs for the collection of normative data, 10 states from various regions of the United States were selected: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The 1981 Directory of Programs and Services for the Deaf in the United States (Craig & Craig, 1981) was used for listing programs serving children in the 3-to-6 age group and having an enrollment of at least 10 students. (This minimum number of students was increased to 25 for Texas and California .) Using these criteria, a list of 122 educational programs was compiled. Letters were sent to administrators of those programs, requesting their cooperation in the collection of completed inventories from teachers of children between the ages of 3.0 and 6.11 years. Enclosed with the letters were copies of the inventory and a sheet for the collection of background information on each child. Of the 122 programs contacted , 52 (43%) agreed to participate and were sent inventories for their students. Two additional programs also agreed to cooperate, mak826 A.A.D. /October 1983 Social-Emotional Adjustment ing the total number of programs 54. Table 1 shows the numbers and proportions of programs and students from each of the 10 states. Description of Children in Normative Group Of the 910 inventories returned by participating programs, 53 were eliminated because children were younger than 3 or older than 7 years of age. The remaining 857 inventories were analyzed . The characteristics of the children on whom these assessments were based are summarized in Table 2. The table...