Activities to teach heat and temperature concepts to visually impaired students

Abstract

AbstractLow vision or blindness are defined as visual impairment, which is the decreased ability to see to a degree that causes problems in education as well as in daily life. Students with visual impairment struggle with learning concepts in science due to using visual objects such as figures, equations and graphs. But the science could be made more accessible to those students through collaboration and specific adaptation in both the science classroom and laboratory by providing simple adaptations or doing some essential modifications to help them gaining experience with measuring, balancing and weighing a variety of materials with simple adaptations or modifications. This study aims to design activities to teach heat and temperature concepts to visually impaired students which are found difficult to comprehend even by the sighted students. For this purpose, instructional material that emphasizing the sense of touch and interactive science activities were designed to make science more accessible to 8th grade students in a special school for visually impaired. The activities basically consist of simple, economical and easily accessible everyday materials. Nearly all of the students indicated that they are quite satisfied if all courses would be taught by activities developed in line with their individual needs.