WISC and Nebraska Performance of Deaf and Hearing Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to evaluate the visual-perceptual skills of deaf and of hearing children; (2) to compare the performances of the two groups on two tests frequently used to assess intellectual functioning; and (3) to compare the performance of deaf children in a day school with those in a residential school. Results indicate deaf children are not inferior to hearing children on visual-perceptual tasks and day-school deaf children performed better than residential deaf children. Differences between the deaf and hearing on the two tests were significant on 3 of the 10 subtests. In addition, normative scores on at least one subtest of the Nebraska appear too high, and correction may be in order. Correlations between the two tests, for both deaf and hearing children, were low.