Chapter 7

What Skills Do I Instruct?

The BVEP addresses the basic visual skills developed by children with typical vision in early childhood. Lueck (2004) describes three categories of visual behaviors:

The BVEP model is slightly different (see Table 7.1). Recognizing that visual skills are used in clusters rather than in isolation (Erin & Topor, 2010) and that intentional use of attending behaviors is always for the purpose of examination (Gibson, 1988), the BVEP provides methods for teaching two categories of visual skills.

Table 7.1 BVEP Visual Skills

Category Skills Media Function
Visual examining behaviors
  • Fixating
  • Tracking
  • Localizing
  • Shifting gaze
  • Scanning
  • 3D objects
  • 2D pictures and symbols
  • Locating
  • Detecting line of travel
  • Identifying
  • Comparing
Visually guided movements of the body
  • Head and body alignment
  • Body to object alignment
  • Object to object alignment
  • 3D objects
  • Obtaining
  • Manipulating
  • Placing

A child cuts a piece of paper following the bold line.

Visual, cognitive, and motor skill interdependence

What about specific skills such as cutting between lines with scissors or matching colors? The BVEP makes a distinction between visual skills and applications of those skills in developmentally- and age-appropriate tasks. The kind of task in which visual skills are used is a combination of the dynamic and mutually interdependent interactions of visual, cognitive, and motor levels of development. The Continuum of Visual Development (Ferrell, 2010) and the Typical Visual Development chart (Ferrell, 2011) provide a side-by-side comparison of visual skills related to other areas of development for children birth through 5 years. See Appendix A for information about visual developmental milestones.

Children with typical vision use visual examining and visually guided movement skills to accomplish a variety of different tasks at different stages of development. An infant may use a cluster of examining skills that consist of fixating, shifting gaze, and tracking to watch his hands as he waves them. A 5-year-old may use the same cluster of visual skills to look at illustrations in a book read by her teacher. Cutting on lines with scissors is often listed as a 5-year-old level visual skill in developmental scales. The visual examining skills used in this task are the same ones developed in infancy. Infants are very good at looking at lines, examining objects such as scissors, and aligning two objects for the purpose of banging them together. The skills that have been added to make cutting possible are motor—the ability to hold the paper in one hand and manipulate the scissors with the other. Another visual skill included in many scales at the 5-year level is matching colors. Infants, at 4 months, discriminate color as well as adults (Ferrell, 2011). It is not a change in visual functioning that gives the child the ability to match colors. It is the development of the cognitive ability to conceptually organize like things into categories. Naming colors is not a visual skill. It is a linguistic skill.

Basic visual skills developed in infancy can become more efficient as a result of practice later in life. Research on the visual behaviors of adept video game players indicates that they visually navigate game screens much faster than unpracticed players. The benefits of this kind of efficiency appear to be media specific. A gamer’s ability to locate, shift, track, and scan visual materials in other contexts is not improved by his ability to perform these skills in a highly efficient manner while looking at a video screen (Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, 2005). Familiarity seems to be the key factor related to improvement. Most people have experienced a decrease in the efficiency of basic visual skills when they try to use someone else’s computer and discover that icons are not in their usual places. This effect has added significance for a student with low vision who may be discovering for the first time that these skills are useful in a situation where they have been unused previously.

The BVEP design asks you to instruct visual skills in tasks that are part of instruction provided to your student on a daily basis. Reference to a scale that shows developmental milestones, especially one like Ferrell’s that references visual skills to general development, can help you evaluate needs related to poor performance on an inventoried task. Visual skill instruction may be inappropriate for some tasks in which performance is more dependent upon improvement of cognitive or motor skills, such as manipulating scissors or the ability to match colors. If performance is compromised by motor abilities, collaboration with an occupational therapist is essential. Or, progress in the development of cognitive and motor skills may be impossible without improvement of basic visual skills such as shifting gaze from one visual target to another to compare colors or visually aligning the scissors with the line on the paper.

An image depicts four objects arranged horizontally on a white background. The first object on the left end is the sample object followed by an array of three objects. The sample object is a red boat. The array of three objects from left to right is as follows: red book, red boat, and red hat.

Visual Identification

Visual perceptual skills

Evaluation of visual perceptual skills can be extremely helpful in deciding whether task performance can be improved by accommodation or instruction (Greer, 2004). Typical tests of visual perception use two-dimensional pictures and designs and three-dimensional objects such as puzzles and form boards. The BVEP expands these resources by including materials to evaluate visual perceptual skills with three-dimensional common objects and with representations of the same objects in different types of pictures. The evaluation of isolated visual perceptual skills in artificial contexts is recommended only for the purpose of helping you know what to look for as you evaluate performance of typical tasks during administration of the BVEE. The BVEP provides strategies to address visual perceptual skills as the need for them is targeted during evaluation of tasks occurring regularly throughout the day.

An image depicts a green boat with half mainsail and headsail, on a white background.

Visual Closure

Visual perception is the process of attaching meaning to a visual image (Corn & Lusk, 2010; Greer, 2004). The following areas are often included in tests of visual perceptual skills.

  • Visual identification or discrimination (matching identical forms)
  • Visual closure (identifying incomplete forms)
  • Figure-ground (differentiating a form from its background)
  • Visual memory (recalling an exact sequence of forms)
  • Part/Whole (identifying one object when part of another object)
  • Constancy (identifying forms regardless of size or orientation)

An image depicts a yellow book on a patterned background.

Figure-ground

There is evidence for improvement of visual perceptual skills in adults without visual impairments. Fine and Jacobs (2002) point to evidence that indicates plasticity of the visual system throughout life. In a review of articles, they noted evidence for neuronal changes in the visual cortex related to improved performance on a variety of visual perceptual tasks after training. Trudeau, Overbury, and Conrod (1980) showed that training improved figure-ground performance in adults who had acquired visual impairments. More research is needed for children with low vision who have difficulty with identification, closure, figure-ground, visual memory, and constancy. Difficulties in these areas may result from lack of experience due to limited access. Barraga (1964) asked students with low vision to match forms presented in arrays similar to those used in tests of visual perception like the Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception. Her findings showed that when the original items were re-administered after a 2-month period during which approximately 30 hours of instruction on similar tasks took place, performance improved. Given the limited amount and type of research available for children with low vision, no conclusions can be made at this time about whether teaching visual perceptual skills in isolated lessons in which one type of skill is practiced results in improved performance of that skill in generalized contexts (Vervloed, Janssen, & Knoors, 2006).

An image depicts a red spoon inside a hat. The hat is inverted in such a way that the button of the hat is at the bottom. The bowl and stem of the spoon are at the top.

Part/Whole

The BVEP provides a menu of perceptual strategies to be used as needed while performing a specific task. Tasks might include things such as finding a toy in a toy box, completing a pattern, or using an illustration to answer a question about a story. Strategies might include things such as using color matching to find the partially hidden object in the toy box, putting a marker next to the item to be repeated in the pattern, or using a penlight to highlight key elements of the picture as they are named. These are not permanent accommodations, but rather, options to be applied as needed during the performance of tasks in natural environments. If poor performance is related to lack of experience, instruction in a specific task may result in improved performance in similar tasks as students learn to apply strategies used successfully in new contexts.

An image depicts four objects arranged horizontally on a white background. The first object on the left end is the sample object followed by an array of three objects. The sample object is a spoon with its bowl part facing left. The array of three objects from left to right is as follows: spoon with its bowl part facing right, spoon with its bowl part facing diagonally right, and spoon with its bowl part facing.

Constancy

Two images depict four objects arranged horizontally on a white background. In the first image, the array of four objects from left to right is as follows: green spoon, blue book, yellow hat, and red boat. In the second image, the array of four objects from left to right is as follows: green spoon, second object is missing, yellow hat, and red boat.

Visual Memory