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Time Spent in Special Education Among Students with Profound Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implantation Compared to Amplification: A Population Study
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What is the overall impact of these findings?
Hi Dr. Dahl, thank you for your question. In short, these findings may assist school districts with resource allocation planning once they are validated with a more clinically robust study. At length: these are preliminary results. Should these findings hold once the analysis is finalized, then the difference in SpEd utilization among these groups may incentivize the NCES to invest in adding clinical variables to their routine longitudinal studies. They had added many clinical variables to their most recent pre-school cohort, the Pre-Elementary Education Longitudinal Study (PEELS) in 2003-2009, however D/HH students appear to have been undersampled in this study in general and then missing data and attrition unfortunately invalidated a subgroup analysis. It appears that much of the data missingness in PEELS for children with CIs may have been related to survey fatigue given copious granular variables in a caregiver survey. Several of the variables were unnecessary for most analyses and many could have been gleaned by linkage, which would have been efficient and objective, with reduced recall bias. By adding just a few objective clinical variables, the validity of the total effect of CI on mainstreaming and declassification would be improved and a direct effect could be measured. The impact of these more robust findings would be that school districts could plan their allocation of resources in advance (e.g. itinerant teacher for the Deaf, SLP). These data also set the stage for better quality cost effectiveness studies on CI, given that prior studies estimated costs for SpEd based on “classroom placement,” which is a rudimentary predictor compared to % time in SpEd/day.