Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Peer-reviewed qualitative study (reproduced in a doctoral thesis)

Academic Success of Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing in Mainstream Higher Education

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/heuij-2023-academic-success/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • Kirsten Maria Louise van den Heuij; Chapter 7 with Karin Neijenhuis and Martine Coene
  • LOT / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, doctoral thesis

Independent (academic research at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; no named study funder in the chapter; thesis acknowledgements thank institutional management for facilitating the research)

Summary

Interviews with 32 Dutch-speaking deaf and hard-of-hearing participants describe helpful lecture-room loops alongside acoustic, microphone and support-service barriers.

Key findings

  • In Chapter 7, the Lecturers subsection (printed page 164) and discussion (page 177) report that students felt lecturers needed repeated reminders about their hearing loss and support needs, despite generally willing and understanding attitudes.
  • Chapter 7, printed pages 149–183, reproduces a 2022 study by van den Heuij, Neijenhuis and Coene in Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 27(4):385–398, DOI 10.1093/deafed/enac020.
  • The purposive volunteer sample comprised 32 participants aged 19–32: 31 enrolled students across 18 institutions (17 in the Netherlands and one in Belgium), and one recent graduate. Twenty-eight used hearing aids and/or cochlear implants; four did not use hearing aids. All were fluent in spoken Dutch and none used sign language as their everyday language.
  • Students described lecture microphones as beneficial but sometimes faulty or unused. Loops were helpful when installed, working and compatible with the student’s hearing device; unobtrusive adjustments such as loops were valued.
  • Participants reported variable room acoustics, difficulty following group discussion, fatigue and choosing seats for audibility and sight of the lecturer, sometimes at the cost of sitting with friends.
  • Student support staff were often described as helpful and understanding, but some students reported limited staff knowledge, delayed contact and burdensome adjustment procedures. The authors propose involving students and support staff in developing a menu of possible adjustments.
  • The chapter also describes personal FM microphone use, with both listening benefits and inconvenience or reluctance to hand over and retrieve equipment; these are personal-system experiences and do not establish preference between venue FM and loops.

Limits

Qualitative self-reports from a small, self-selected spoken-Dutch group, including one recent graduate; no prevalence estimate or controlled comparison between venue systems. The thesis copyright provides the 2023 date, with year precision; the underlying article is from 2022. Read the chapter and relevant front matter and acknowledgements, not every study in the thesis. No dedicated funder statement was found for this chapter.

Read the original

www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/645_fulltext.pdf

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Cited in

Cite this source

Kirsten Maria Louise van den Heuij; Chapter 7 with Karin Neijenhuis and Martine Coene. Academic Success of Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing in Mainstream Higher Education. LOT / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, doctoral thesis. 2023. https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/645_fulltext.pdf (accessed 13 October 2026).

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