Suchergebnisse

This article reports on the revision and field tests in the final stages of a three-year project to develop an assessment instrument and programmed instruction in orientation and mobility for visually impaired persons over age 60. The goal was to produce materials that could be administered by professionals and lay persons who are involved with visually impaired persons in a variety of individual environments.

This article describes a model for training teachers of visually impaired children in rural areas at George Peabody College for Teachers and the innovative strategies used in the training program. The shortage of teachers of the visually impaired necessitates the development of training programs that are flexible and accessible to individuals who are employed in rural areas that need properly trained professionals.

Residential schools for blind people were surveyed to determine the extent of services provided for visually impaired children in local day school programs. All the residential schools were providing some form of service for these children. The most popular services offered by the 41 schools in the survey were professional development services, special intervention programs, preschool services, summer school programs, and book, equipment, and supplies services. Residential schools in the more sparsely populated states provided more services than residential schools in the more densely populated states.

This article reports on the development of an assessment instrument and a training curriculum in orientation and mobility, to be used by families or friends of older blind and visually impaired adults, as well as by professionals in vision and related fields. A field test of the materials was conducted, using the assessment instrument in a pretest-posttest design, with the training curriculum and a structured control activity administered during intervention. Although the materials received enthusiastic support from the project's consultants and participants, no significant treatment or interaction effects were found. Future revisions of the materials are required to deal with methodological and design issues.

The purpose of this study was to examine the educational placement of visually impaired children and related factors that might be helpful in the development of placement procedures for day school programs. The widespread acceptance of multiply handicapped children in day school programs appears to be affecting educational placement and related factors.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a programmed instructional program in orientation and mobility for blind multiply handicapped infants and toddlers below the developmental age of 3 years. Scales were developed for each of four major areas: motor development, cognitive development, movement and touch, and sound localization. Programmed instruction training materials were developed for each of these scales. The scales and programmed instruction were then field-tested with 22 multiply handicapped blind infants and toddlers functioning between 0 and 3 years of age. The children who received intervention from trainers using the programmed instructional materials demonstrated significant performance gains over the control subjects in the areas of cognitive development and movement and touch.