Teaching Level-1 Braille Reading Skills within a Stimulus Equivalence Paradigm to Children with Progressive Visual Impairments

• Main Author: Toussaint, Karen Ann
• Other Authors: Clayton Cook
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2009
• Subjects: Psychology
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142009-173520/

Degenerative visual impairments refer to conditions that result in the progressive loss of vision; several of these conditions have their onset during childhood. Nearly 3% of the school-aged population will experience vision loss that will require specialized support, yet there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate braille-instruction programs. The current study evaluated an instructive procedure for teaching early braille-reading skills with four school-aged children with degenerative visual impairments. Following a series of pretests, braille instruction involved providing a sample braille letter and teaching the selection of the corresponding printed text letter from a comparison array. Concomitant with increases in the accuracy of this skill, we assessed and captured the formation of equivalence classes through tests of symmetry and transitivity between the text letters, the corresponding braille letter, and their spoken name.