The Effects of Verbal Mediation Training on the Problem-Solving Skills of Children with Partial Sight and Children without Visual Impairments

Thirty children with partial sight and 30 children with unimpaired sight aged between 8 and 12 years were randomly assigned to either verbal mediation or visual mediation training regimes. Participants were asked to complete four variations of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and success on the task was judged on the basis of the number of moves and time taken to complete the puzzles. Children with visual impairments had some difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the problem-solving tasks. However, on the final and most difficult of the tasks (a four-disc problem), the children with impaired sight performed very much like participants without visual impairments. The effect of verbal mediation training was superior to that of visual mediation training in the final trials of the four-disc problem-solving period for both children with partial sight and children without visual impairments.