Testing the hearing level of schoolchildren: comparison of several currently used screening techniques.

An attempt was made to validate several currently used methods of screening the hearing level of children in schools (selecting the quietest area available in the school). Each child was screened with watch tick, hand-held beeper (frequencies, 600 Hz and 2500 Hz at 25 dB HL), whispered voice, and pure-tone audiometry. Screening audiometry is currently the most effective technique for the detection of deafness in the school population, but only if background noise is minimal. The watch and whispered voice methods are unreliable for identification of mild conductive hearing impairment for English-speaking children and are useless for screening children whose grasp of the English language is inadequate. This latter category may include deaf children.