Division on Visual Impairments

DVI Quarterly Volume 59(3)

A quarterly newsletter from the Council for Exceptional Children's Division on Visual Impairments containing practitioner tips for Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments, Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and other professionals.

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; Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2016 13 Effect of Auditory Working Memory Training in Students with Visual Impairments on Mathematic Problem Solving Dake Zhang 1 & Yi Ding 2 1. Rutgers University, Assistant Professor of Special Education dake.zhang@gse.rutgers.edu 2. Fordham University, Assistant Professor of School Psychology yding4@fordham.edu There is an increased attention in interventions for students with general mathematic learning difficulties. However, there is limited research addressing the special difficulties in mathematic problem solving in students with visual impairments (VI). The lack of visual cues makes mathematic problem solving more difficult for individuals with VI than others. Given the limited supply of Braille publications, audio reading materials are increasingly popular among students with VI. A common difficulty encountered by people with VI when solving mathematic problems with audio materials, however, is the lengthy auditory representation of mathematic problems. For example, a two-step arithmetic problem "(5 + 6) × 8" may be easily written as a combination of two operations of three numbers but may be read "five plus six and then times eight" which contains lots of sounds and semantic information. Also, in some instances, auditory expressions can be ambiguous (e.g., "5 plus six times eight" can be either "(5 + 6) × 8" or "5 + 6 × 8") necessitating additional clarification information. In addition, when reading visual materials, readers without VI are able to go back to previous text to retrieve needed information. For example, to solve "5 + 6 × 8", someone without VI does not have to remember the first addend 5 because he/she can always look back to check the first addend after calculating 6 × 8. In contrast, it is almost impossible for individuals with VI to "listen back" to retrieve needed information. Specifically, if an individual with VI cannot 40

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