Comparing Responses to the Kim Carrad Test and the Tower of London Test Between Hearing-Impaired and Healthy Students

Hearing impairments affect most adaptation aspects of individuals with the environment and cause a delay in their mental processes. Deaf children present unique features which can be improved using various behavioral, emotional, and educational methods. Deaf individuals experience significant delays in cognitive growth aspects and language generation. Primary hearing impairments could lead to creating compensatory changes in visual processing. Visual working memory can increase one of the observing functions in deaf individuals as well as planning and organizing ability as the main implementing interactions and brain functions. i.e., important to researchers. Thus, the current study aimed to explore the differences of visual active memory and organizing between hearing–impaired and healthy students.

This was a descriptive and causal–comparative study. The statistical population of the study consisted of all first–year students of deaf and ordinary middle schools in Arak City, Iran, in the academic year of 2018–2019. Sixty students (30 deaf & 30 healthy individuals) were selected through the convenience sampling method as the study sample. The inclusion criteria of this study were as follows: male students, aged 13 to 15 year, providing consent to participate in the study, a specific rate of hearing loss (students who have lost >25 decibels of hearing), the lack of intellectual disability, the lack of vision problems, and the lack of physical or motor issues. The exclusion criteria of the study were the lack of students’ collaboration in the research process and failure to complete the research tests by the students. The measurement tools in this study included the Tower of London test (Shallice, 1982) for measuring executive planning and organization and the Kim Karad test (Groth–Marnat, 2003) for the visual estimation of memory. The obtained data were analyzed in SPSS using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) at a significance level of 0.01.

The MANOVA results revealed a significant difference between hearing–impaired and healthy subjects concerning long–term memory and short–term memory (p<0.001) and working memory (p=0.034). Furthermore, there was a significant difference between the study groups in the time delay component, and overall time in the planning and organizing components (p<0.001).

Based on the present research findings, the memory ability as well as the planning and ‎‎organizing ability of students with hearing impairment ‎were weak; thus, such aspects require further ‎attention of the authorities.‎