Efficacy Report: Early Education Project

Abstract

The Early Education Project is a center-based program conducted in a home demonstration center. The project serves parents of children under 6 years of age who are diagnosed or strongly suspected to have educationally significant hearing impairment. The primary goal of this early intervention is to initiate the acquisition of receptive and expressive language by these children. Although the pupils in the program are the parents, tools to assess their skills were not available for our evaluation. Since the ultimate goal was development of the child's language we elected to evaluate it. However, existing scales of language development in the normally hearing child are inappropriate for measuring language growth in the deaf child since many of the items describe responses to auditory stimuli. Therefore, the Scales of Early Communication Skills were designed by Moog and Geers specifically for hearing-impaired children just beginning to acquire language skills. The items were intended to evaluate speech and language development. The research department conducted the program evaluation. Forty-four children were given five successive language evaluations over a 2½ year period. Statistical analysis of these ratings demonstrated that scores increased consistently, reliably, and linearly throughout all age ranges.