Seeing Chemistry through the Eyes of the Blind: A Case Study Examining Multiple Gas Law Representations

Abstract

Adequately accommodating students who are blind or low-vision (BLV) in the sciences has been a focus of recent inquiry, but much of the research to date has addressed broad accommodations rather than devising and testing specific teaching strategies that respond to the unique challenges of BLV students learning chemistry. This case study seeks to identify instructional techniques that support or impede the representation of information for BLV students in the context of a typical gas laws unit in a college chemistry course for science majors. Desimone's framework on selection and attention informed the analysis. A blind student participated in five interviews to provide insights on how symbols, equations, and concepts were communicated and interpreted. Findings identified in the analysis of transcripts pertain to three communication modalities of interest: verbal, written, and tactile representations of information to aid learning. Using the results generated for practitioners, the authors generated guidelines for faculty, teaching assistants, and university administrators to improve the teaching and learning chemistry for BLV students.

Postsecondary physics curricula and Universal Design for Learning: Planning for diverse learners

“…However, research should also focus on how such tools are used by a variety of students. For example, Harshman, Bretz, and Yeziersk found that accommodations produced by sighted researchers could be overwhelming for learners who are blind or who have low vision [63]. Thus, future work should investigate alternate representations of information and how these alternatives are used by a variety of students.…”

Using Interviews in CER Projects: Options, Considerations, and Limitations

“…However, some researchers may choose to use unstructured interviews to gather information that can help them develop more structured interview protocols to use in their data collection. One interesting use of an unstructured interview in CER is a recent study designed to identify effective instructional strategies for assisting a visually impaired student in understanding gas laws (6). The researchers used tutoring sessions as an initial data source.…”

Using Qualitative Analysis Software To Facilitate Qualitative Data Analysis

“…The use of this type of software can help chemistry education researchers more easily identify trends in students' alternative conceptions (18), explore teachers' instructional goals and strategies (19,20), collect exploratory data to guide the development of quantitative research instruments (21), identify educational approaches that support learning (22), or elicit students' beliefs and perspective about diverse educational issues (23). The default structure of the coding scheme in common CAQDAS packages tends to be hierarchical (except in ATLAS.ti).…”