SAA SPOTLIGHT | Say the Word ‘Survey’: Part 2 of 2—A Second Look at the Data on Audiology Education

By Sarah Camera, Jessica Lewis, and J. Riley DeBacker

This article is a part of the September/October 2019, Volume 31, Number 5, Audiology Today issue.

Introduction and Methods

In September 2018, the Student Academy of Audiology (SAA) conducted a national survey of current graduate students, externs, and recent graduates in order to evaluate the state of audiology education. With more than 1,000 responses, the results from the SAA 2018 Education and Externship Survey provide a good look at a number of the strengths and the potential areas for improvement in audiology training.

Part 1 of this article, published in the July/August 2019 issue of Audiology Today, presents results from the SAA survey and discusses disparities in the AuD externship. This article, a continuation of that piece, provides an examination of the current state of AuD education, excluding the externship.

Content of Education

The audiological scope of practice requires the teaching of a variety of topics in graduate education programs. Standard content in audiology curricula includes education and experience with diagnostics (including for adult, pediatric, vestibular, tinnitus, electrophysiology, and central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) testing) and rehabilitation (including aural rehabilitation, assistive listening devices, hearing aids, osseointegrated devices, cochlear implants, verification, tinnitus and cerumen management, vestibular rehabilitation, educational audiology, and CAPD intervention).

While this is not an exhaustive list, the survey results revealed that students reported differences across programs in the amount of experience received in areas such as assistive listening devices, tinnitus diagnostics and management, and pediatric diagnostics.

These results suggest that the dissimilarities across programs could lead to inconsistently trained audiology graduates, as well as graduates who are inadequately prepared to provide the full scope of practice.

In addition to topic areas considered standard, other areas such as cognitive decline, medical imaging, and pharmacology have recently gained attention. According to the survey findings, students’ satisfaction with their knowledge in these areas depended on their AuD program. For each of the above-mentioned topics, students whose AuD programs have dedicated classes in those areas reported having more knowledge than students from AuD programs that do not have those classes, even if the subject was addressed in other coursework.

This result again emphasizes that graduates are unequally prepared, even in areas related to the expanding scope of audiology. Knowledge of cognitive decline, medical imaging, and pharmacology will prove useful as health care continues to become more collaborative.