What is it about?
Individuals who are blind or have low vision use white canes and alternative techniques to navigate home, work, and school environments. The TAPS curriculum is widely used to teach those skills, called orientation and mobility skills. Our research created factors from the 10-item TAPS on-campus skills checklist. Factor analysis makes it possible to use smaller samples in the future for regression analysis, which is helpful for use with low incidence populations.
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Why is it important?
It is difficult to find data of sufficient sample size for analysis among low incidence disability populations. NLTS2 oversampled youth with low incidence disabilities, creating a nationally representative sample of youths who are blind or visually impaired. We used this sample to examine the results of a commonly used checklist of orientation and mobility skills, the TAPS checklist of on campus mobility (Pogrund et al., 1995). Our analysis demonstrated an approach that could be used to generate factors from a large number of variables among a low incidence population, making future studies possible with smaller populations.
Perspectives
The TAPS curriculum is used extensively in the field of education of individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Our analysis demonstrates a method to reduce a group of variables to a smaller set of factors. The smaller set of factors can be used to generate valid conclusions with smaller sample sizes.
Lydia Schuck
Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Approach to Using Orientation and Mobility (O&M) Variables from the Second National Longitudinal Transition Study, March 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0145482x1811200208.
You can read the full text:
Resources
TAPS--Teaching Age-Appropriate Purposeful Skills--An Orientationa and Mobility Curriculum for Students with Visual Impairments, 3e
This curriculum includes goals, objectives, and teaching strategies as well as functional mobility tasks, for the following environments: home/living, campus, residential, commercial and public transportation, as well as an ambulatory devices section. The four-part set also includes extensive appendices containing a wide range of O&M related topics and a supplement that details street crossing strategies.
Second National Longitudinal Transition Study--NLTS2
Source of data, reports and analyses generated from the NLTS2
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
