Gender differences in response to auditory-verbal intervention in children who are deaf or hard of hearing

Recent research has questioned the role of gender in language development and in special education outcomes, yet neither issue has been addressed in literature on students who are deaf or hard of hearing. To determine if language and placement outcomes differ by gender, the present study considered the behavior of children who attended a clinical program subscribing to an auditory-verbal philosophy. Parents of 28 boys and 42 girls with hearing losses evaluated their children using the Parent Rating Scale of the Leiter International Performance Scale-Revised (Roid & Miller, 1997) and the Parental View of Therapy Scale (developed for the present study). Also, clinical file data were surveyed. The boys were found to be more likely than the girls to be rated by their parents as having basic features of temperament nonconducive to traditional clinical language intervention. The girls' language and placement outcomes surpassed the boys', although both groups' outcomes were positive. A possible limitation of the study was that the population was atypical of students with hearing losses in general.