Assessing Students with Visual
Impairments who are from Diverse
Backgrounds: My Experience as a
Bilingual Diagnostician and a TVI
Olaya Landa-Vialard
Doctoral Candidate
Texas Tech University
olaya.landa-vialard@ttu.edu
Planning an assessment for a student who
is visually impaired could be a daunting task for
professionals who don't have experience working
with this population or knowledge about its unique
needs. This task could be even more intimidating
when the student is from a culturally and/or linguistically diverse background (CLDB). In this article, I will share my practice-based experience as
a bilingual educational diagnostician and teacher
of students with visual impairment in evaluating
students from CLDB. Information about different
assessments and suggestions on informal
evaluations that could be used with this population will also be shared.
It would be appropriate to start out this "howto" article by asking the following questions: What
tests are available for use when assessing students who are visually impaired? What assessments can be used with students from CLDB who
are visually impaired? While there have been attempts to create standardized tests to use with
students with visual impairments, there are no instruments available that have been normed and
designed for this diverse and unique population.
Because of this, educational diagnosticians often
have no other option than using tests that are not
specifically designed for students with visual impairments. When a test is designed specifically
for these students, the test results could provide
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