Perceptions of academic quality among students with a hearing loss in distance education.

There has been little research on the experiences of students with a hearing loss in mainstream higher education. This investigation compared perceptions of academic quality in 265 students with a hearing loss who were taking courses by distance learning and 178 students taking the same courses who had no declared form of disability. Students who were classified as hard of hearing (rather than deaf) produced significantly lower ratings of the appropriateness of their academic workload than did the students with no declared disability, but the ratings produced by students who were classified as deaf were not significantly different from those produced by the comparison group. In other respects, the students with a hearing loss were remarkably similar to the students with no declared disability in their perceptions of academic quality and their overall satisfaction with their courses.