Knowledge, Attitude of Sikkim Primary School Teachers About Paediatric Hearing Loss

Our purpose of the study was to assess the knowledge and any gaps of early educators regarding hearing impairment, and to attempt to delineate the attitudes and perceptions of the educators regarding the outcomes of their students with hearing disabilities and their views on inclusive teaching, using a questionnaire based study. Only 71 respondents completed the questionnaire. The present questionnaire based study was conducted on 100 primary school teachers, undertaken on randomly selected schools from Gangtok, East Sikkim. Their knowledge and attitudes regarding hearing impairment in children in the areas of cause, diagnosis, investigations, treatment, prevention, special care and inclusion into mainstream schools were assessed. Our study showed that the knowledge of causes, investigation and treatment of hearing impairement [HI] among respondents/teachers was poor. The data was shown statistically significant with P < 0.001. However, responses testing behavior and attitudes towards HI was encouraging. 52.9% respondents disagreed that HI was a social handicap and 88.2% felt that teachers need special training before a HI child is admitted to the school. The results were statistically significant with P < 0.001. The biggest obstacle found for inclusive education of HI children was a lack of proper training to teachers (40.8%) and attitude of other students (29.5%).