Performance of hearing-impaired students on planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive (PASS) cognitive processing tasks

This study examined the relationships among planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive (PASS) cognitive processing tasks for a sample of hearing-impaired students. There were 96 students (51 girls, 45 boys), aged 8 years to 16 years 11 months (mean AGE = 12.4 years, SD = 2.5 years). Most of the subjects (59%) received instruction through total communication and the remaining 41% students were enrolled in oral educational programs. The sample students attended a public day school (73%) or a state residential school for the deaf (27%). The confirmatory factorial results demonstrate that the PASS model was supported for this hearing-impaired sample as it has been in previous investigations involving normally hearing samples. These results support other exploratory and confirmatory factorial studies that have shown PASS tasks to be consistent with expectations.