THE STUDY OF SPECIAL EDUCATION SERVICE DELIVERY ON THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENT

ABSTRACT

This study investigate the study of special education service delivery on the academic performance of students with hearing impairment in Ganaka International School Jos North Local Government of Plateau State. The research was aimed at finding out whether there was any difference in the academic performance of students with hearing impairment. Three research questions and two hypotheses were generated for the study and data collected for testing hypotheses were analyzed by the use of frequency distribution to obtain the mean scores of responses to the questionnaire items. Twelve (12) questionnaire items was raised for students with hearing impairment to find out the study of special education service delivery on the academic performance of students with hearing impairment.

The results of the findings revealed that students with hearing impairment performed better academically when exposed to any of the special education. services such as hearing aids computers. Based on the findings it was recommended that parents of students with hearing impairment should support the provision of special education service delivery tools such as hearing aids for their children who are hearing impaired, and students with hearing impairment should be motivated to more special education service delivery their learning materials as this improves long term academic retention and success.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Special education is a specially design instruction that meets the unique needs of a student with disability. Kirk and Gallagher (1992), describe special education as any form of education specially designed for exceptional students. These are students who are not able to respond to and benefit from programmes in regular school and must be given special consideration and assistance.

They therefore see special education as those additional services over and above the regular school programme that are provided for exceptional children to assist in the development of their potentialities and or amelioration of their disabilities. In the same vein, Okyere and Adams (2003) reported Heward and Orlansky (1992) as saying that special education is designed to respond to the unique characteristics of children who have needs that cannot be met by the regular school instructional programming and practice. According to them, special education is individually planned systematically and carefully evaluated instruction to help exceptional learners achieve the greatest possible personal self-sufficiency and success in present and future environments.

Edwen (1995) on the other hand regards special education as those additional services over and above the regular programme that are provided for exceptional children to assist in the development of their potentialities and or the amelioration of their disabilities.

The national policy on education having high regards for special education as the education of children and adults who have learning difficulties because of different sort of handicaps blindness, partial sightedness, deafness, hard of hearing, mental retardation, social maladjustment physical handicap etc due to circumstances of birth, inheritance, social position, mental and physical health pattern or accident in later life; as a result, a few children and adults are unable to cope with the normal school class organization and methods. The policy also states this concerning the gifted and talented children they are the specially gifted children who are intellectually precocious and find themselves insufficiently challenged by the programme of the normal school and who may take to stubbornness and apathy in resistance to it.

Form all the analysis made above the consensus among them is that it is the education for student with special needs who have a type of disability, who lag behind their peers academically as well as those who are gifted and talented. This group of individuals is recognized as exceptional individuals because they also need specialized help in order to fully develop their potential. Therefore, special education involve meeting the need of exceptional individuals in a manner that enable them all to reach their fullest potential. This then means providing equal opportunity for all students, including exceptional students to learn and also achieve in their chosen fields of endeavour.

In order not to let the exceptional children waste away, special education programmes are developed for them to help develop their potentials. These special education programme according to professionals in the field of special education such as Abang (1995), Eduwen (1995), Mba (1982), are outlined as follows:

1. Integrated school class programme in which exceptional children need some modification of materials and techniques or some supplementary teaching by regular teachers or special teacher assigned to regular classrooms.

2. Itinerant teacher services in which special needs children receive specialized additional teaching at certain period by visiting specialist such as speech pathologist, remedial reading teacher and others.

3. Regular schools with partially integrated programme which permit exceptional children to take some of their lesson in special classes taught by special teacher, while other lessons are taken in regular classes for example, the deaf child may take language lessons in a special class but may join his classmates for other lesson like physical education activities.

4. Special day schools in which exceptional children receive full time special instruction in special education lesson but come to school from home each day.

5. Hospital or home bound instructions for exceptional children who cannot attend school due to illness or other conditions.

6. Residential schools for the severely handicapped such as boarding schools for the profoundly deaf, blind and the trainable mentally retarded.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

It has been acknowledged that student with hearing impairment encounter major difficulties in achieving their great potentials if the necessary programme are not made available for them and it has been proven that they perform very poorly in English language and mathematics in academic work as it is obvious that most of their teachers are not specialist and therefore do not offer the right kind of educational programme required.

Furthermore, most of the educational programme provided in the schools for the deaf lack the skills of supportive service such as hospital bound instruction required for the exceptional children lack, the itinerant teacher in which special needs children receive specialized additional teaching at certain period by visiting specialist such as speech pathologist, remedial reading teacher.

Therefore, the statement of the problem is the study of service delivery on the academic performance of selected students with hearing impairment.

1.3 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY