Results of an auditory training for blind/visually impaired children and teenagers are presented. A measure of the training eectiveness is the dierence between the results of a pre-and post-training verication test. Two age groups of visually handicapped young persons were tested: 712 years old and 1419 years old. It was shown that the training may be beneciary for blind or visually impaired children and teenagers, especially in tasks related to localization of moving sound sources. No dierences in training results were found between age groups. The results of trained groups were compared to those obtained for not trained control groups of young blind individuals.

Elaboration of a new method of teaching spatial orientation to blind and visually handicapped persons base on urban environment sounds was shown. Task 1 is a questionnaire inquiry on the problems of the blind moving in a big city. In Task 2 a preliminary selection and classication of the acoustic signals and vibrations that can be useful for spatial orientation was made. In Task 3 an analysis of acoustic signals for sound signalisation at pedestrian crossings was made. Some solutions for acoustic signalization were proposed. In Task 4 sounds and vibrations necessary for a library of acoustic events and situations characteristic of a city were recorded. In Task 5 the library was created and arranged to be ready to be used by teachers in the spatial orientation training. The most important outcome of the study was to develop a method of spatial orientation teaching with employment of sounds and verication of the method (Task 6). After verication it is concluded that the method is useful for spatial education of the blind at dierent levels of their education.

Performance of blind/visually impaired children and teenagers before and after the auditory training and the music training in some auditory tasks (pitch discrimination, pitch-timbre categorization, pitch memory, lateralization of a stationary sound of a drum, lateralization of one or two moving motor vehicles) is compared. In the auditory training, the subjects were actively involved, i.e. they had to answer questions related to presented sound material. The music training was based on passive listening to sounds presented according to the Tomatis method. The training (auditory or music) effectiveness was measured as a difference between results of a pre-and post-training verification test in which the subjects were asked to perform the auditory tasks mentioned at the beginning. The persons who took part in the study were divided into two age groups: 7-12 year olds and 13-19 year olds. According to the results, the auditory training was beneficial for blind or visually impaired teenagers, especially in respect of lateralization tasks. For small children the auditory training was not as effective as for adolescents. However, it has been shown that the music training was generally beneficial for them, although none of the verification tasks was privileged.

No abstract

Higher education in Poland is either state owned or private. The total number of students in the institutions of higher education at the university level amounts to 630<th>000, which makes 15 students per 1000 citizens. As a rule, the education provided by state-owned schools is free. Among the state-owned educational institutions, presently in Poland, there are 13 universities, 18 technical universities, 8 musical academies, and 12 medical academies in which acoustics (or only psychoacoustics) is learned at selected branches of the studies The subject of acoustics is not provided in private schools. In this survey a directory of schools will be given with the details of studies where acoustics is available, including the numbers of students, hours, and the topics taught in the lectures and tutorials.