Visually impaired children's strategies for memorising a map

Abstract

This article describes research carried out in 1993. 24 children with visual impairments and 22 sighted children (aged seven to 13 years) were asked to learn a tactile map and then reconstruct it from memory. While the children were learning the map they gave a continuous commentary on what they were doing and thinking. The commentaries and map reconstructions were analysed to identify and assess the learning strategies which the children used to memorise the map. Overall, the reconstructions made by children with visual impairments were less accurate than the ones made by sighted children. However, it was noted that most of the children with visual impairments used strategies which were inappropriate for the task. It is suggested that teaching appropriate learning strategies would improve the ability of visually impaired children to encode information from tactile maps.