Students with an Auditory Processing Problem

• An Auditory Processing Problem (APP) occurs when a child cannot understand or interpret what they hear. Their ears hear sounds, but the information gets garbled, blocked, or delayed on its way to the brain.
• An estimated 5% of school-age children in the US have an APP.¹ However, it is often misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD.
• These children have problems discriminating between sounds. Thus SES's are extremely beneficial because they not only amplify the teacher's voice but they enhance it, because the teacher can speak in a normal conversational tone of voice. Thus the result is a crisp, clear, voice that enables the listener to more easily detect and discriminate the subtle differences in the different sounds.
• Additionally, a child with an APP can only do so much listening before he/she tunes out because of overload and fatigue. These children use more energy to listen, understand, store, and retrieve information. SES's reduce the auditory strain that these children experience when engaged in auditory learning.

Students with a Minimal Hearing Loss

• A 1998 study reported in the Journal of the AMA showed that 14.9% of school-aged children have some degree of hearing loss.²
• A 1990 MARRS study - Flexer (1989) found that 43% of students had a minimal hearing loss on any given day and 75% of primary-level children attending LD classes also did not have normal hearing.³

Students with a Severe Hearing Loss Using Personal Assistive Devices

• These students currently "miss out" on passive learning that takes places from discussions/contributions of other students in the classroom and from sound generated from other media sources in the room. A personal system alone only allows the hard of hearing child to hear the teacher. Most quality classroom sound enhancement systems include a handheld student pass-around microphone that allows the hard of hearing child to hear the other students.
• Teachers do NOT need to wear an additional microphone. Teachers simply wear the microphone for the classroom SES and the transmitter/microphone for the personal system is connected to the classroom SES receiver. Many classroom SES models are able to interface with ANY of the personal assitive devices on the market, but be sure to confirm this with vendors if such an option is important for your implementation. This may be important if existing service contracts for personal assistive devices need to be honored.
• Some systems allow multimedia sources (such as projectors & TV monitors) to be connected to the SES so that their sound is also pumped directly to the student's personal assistive device as well.

Students with a Temporary Hearing Loss Due to Ear Infections (OME)

• Research suggests that approximately 10-15% of all elementary school children are experiencing mild hearing losses associated with OME at any given time.⁴
• Sometimes weeks or months may pass before a parent realizes that the child has an infection or fluid build-up.
• Fluid can remain trapped in the middle ear for 3-6 weeks before it is cleared, even after a week of antibiotics.
• Chronic middle ear infections can have significant effects on the auditory processing skills putting them "at-risk" for learning problems.

Students with Behavioral or Attentive Disorders (ADD or ADHD)

• According to a 2018 article published in The Journal of Pediatrics, 7.4% of children aged 3-17 years (approximately 4.5 million) have a diagnosed behavior problem.⁵
• As of 2016, 9.4% of children aged 2-17 years (approximately 6.1 million) have received an ADHD diagnosis.⁶
• The CDC (2016) reported that 62 percent of those diagnosed with ADHD were taking medication as part of the treatment.⁷
• "Many children that are labeled ADD or ADHD have very distorted hearing. I suspect that up to 70% of the children on Ritalin are on it for this specific reason." (Kay Ness, MS, Neurodevelopmentalist)⁸
• The symptoms of hearing problems are often the same as ADD and ADHD. It makes sense. If a child can't hear accurately or intelligibly, why would they remain engaged in auditory learning?

Students Learning English as a Second Language

• Children for whom English is a second language exhibit greater speech perception difficulties than native English speaking children.⁹
• Results of a 1994 MARRS project (Mainstream Amplification Resource Room Study, a project of the National Diffusion Network funded by the U.S. Department of Education) showed that ESOL students experience significant difficulty understanding spoken English in a typically noisy classroom environment.
• ESOL children require a SNR of +16 to 20 dBA.
• A study by Darai (2000) showed greater literacy gains especially for bilingual students when taught in a sound enhanced classroom.¹⁰
• A four-year study by Brigham Young University, reported an average +16% increase in the Criterion Reference Test scores of the ELL population from 2000 to 2003.¹¹

Students with Perfectly Normal Hearing

• Even a "normal" hearing child can miss as much as 1/3 of what teachers say due to poor acoustics.¹⁴
• Numerous studies done have shown that using a SES, children with "normal" hearing experienced an increase in test scores across the board (reading, language, Scholastic Aptitude Tests, spelling, math, science, and others.) See the research pages on this site for more information.

All Teachers

• Teachers are more than twice as likely as non-teachers to have voice problems.¹⁵
• Teacher voice problems cost the economy $2.5 billion annually.¹⁶
• Nearly 600,000 US teachers miss at least one day per year from teaching due to a voice problem.¹⁷
• At least one-third of teachers complain a voice problem from teaching and some have to reduce teaching activities or stop teaching because of it.¹⁸
• Several studies have found SESs reduces teacher absences due to vocal strain and voice fatigue.¹⁹
• SESs result in students being more attentive and having fewer requests for repeated instructions. This makes the classroom a less stressful environment to work in.
• SESs increase teacher mobility.