Prof Robert Cowan2, Dr Aleisha Davis1, Dr Pia Watkins1, Ms Tess Ansell1
1The Shepherd Centre, Sydney, Australia, 2University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Normed scales are commonly used to track Infants’ growth and development. Whilst universal newborn screening is effective at identifying infants requiring audiological follow up, there is currently no universally accepted norms tracking development of listening skills. The Functional Listening Index – Paediatric® (FLI-P) was envisaged to address the need for tracking development of listening milestones for children with hearing loss across the critical ages of 0 to 6 years.
Methods:
The FLI-P, a list of 64 statements describing specific functional listening skills, is completed, usually on-line, by a parent and/or child’s early intervention team. By identifying which skills a child has successfully acquired (i.e. FLI-P score), parents and professionals can track skill acquisition in children with hearing loss. To provide a comparator, FLI-P scores were collected on 561 typically-hearing children, grouped into 6-month age blocks across the age range from 0-72 months. FLI-P scores for individual children with differing types and degrees of hearing loss and at different age points were plotted against the typically-hearing norms to assess usability.
Results:
Parents successfully completed the FLI-P for all children across all age brackets from 0-6yrs. FLI-P scores for the 16th and 84th percentiles were found to represent minus one and plus one standard deviations from the group mean. FLI-P scores for individual children with hearing loss were plotted within these norms and the trajectory of their skill development compared with typically-hearing peers at different ages.
Conclusion:
A set of norms for typically hearing children from 0 to 6 years of age were obtained. FLI-P scores for individual children with hearing loss were plotted over time against the group norms, providing a trajectory of listening skill development over time. FLI-P scores reflected clinical concerns such as middle ear pathology or changes in hearing levels at an early stage as illustrated with case studies.
Biography:
Biography to come.