THE IMPACT OF VISUAL IMPAIRMENT ON A CHILD’S LEARNING ABILITY

Severe visual impairment is a profound disability and affects every aspect of the child's perception, cognitive development, learning, behaviour, interaction, emotional state and autonomy.

Visual impairment can affect:

1.The child's development of mental processes such as conceptual thought, logical memory and language.

2.His/her perception of the immediate environment, objects, learning resources and other people.

3.The time needed to take in information or perform tasks.

4.His/her ability to detect non-verbal clues, facial expressions, posture, body language, and spatial arrangements (height, width, length and shape), resulting in a delay in building up an understanding of objects or situations from separate components.

5.The child's awareness of his/her own non-verbal gestures and expressions on others.

The fact the your child is seeing doesn’t mean he or she is well sighted. Any child that is visually impaired can see like every other child but his or her vision may not be up to the standard visual acuity required for an effective learning in the class room. When a child visual acuity is below 6/12 then such a child is considered to be visually impaired and this may affect his or her learning ability. The only way to know if your child is visually impaired is to go for a comprehensive eye examination to access how well he or she can see. That little child who is not doing well in school maybe as a result of visual impairment. A child who is visually impaired should not be allow to compete in the same classroom with those children who are well sighted. A child who is visually impaired can be made to learn in the same environment with those who are well sighted if only the child’s vision is corrected. Learning be very difficult for a child who is visually impaired.


Early signs and symptoms of vision impairment

Children who have vision impairment might have normal-looking eyes. Often, it will be something about a child’s behaviour or the way he uses his eyes that makes you think there might be a problem with the way he sees.

Most babies start to focus on faces and objects by 4-5 weeks of age. By about 6-8 weeks, most babies will start smiling at the familiar faces and things they see. But if a baby has a vision impairment, you might notice she has trouble doing this.

Other signs that a baby might have a problem with his vision are if his:

1. eyes move quickly from side to side (nystagmus), jerk or wander randomly
2. eyes don’t follow your face or an object, or he 3. 3. doesn’t seem to make eye contact with family and friends
4. eyes don’t react to bright light being turned on in the room
5. pupils seem white or cloudy rather than black
6. eyes don’t appear straight but turn towards the nose or drift outwards.
An older child might:

1. hold things up close to her face
2. say she is tired or rub her eyes a lot
3. turn or tilt her head or cover one eye when looking at things up close
4. get tired after looking at things up close – for example, reading, drawing or playing handheld games
5. seem to see better during the day than at night
seem to have crossed or turned eyes or a squint (lazy eye)
6. seem clumsy – for example, she might knock things over or trip often.


Every child must have his or her checked before being admitted into the class room so as to ensure effective learning and equal playing ground for the class mates

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