Η ανάπτυξη των απόψεων των εκ γενετής τυφλών παιδιών για το σχήμα της γης και την εναλλαγή της μέρας/νύχτας

Abstract

An experiment is presented which investigated the conceptions of the earth in congenitally blind and sighted children. Twenty visually impaired and twenty sighted children attending first and third grade were interviewed individually in order to investigate their ideas about the earth. The children were asked questions about the shape and
movement of the Earth the Sun and the Moon and about the day/night cycle. They were also asked to construct models of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon using playdough. Τhe results showed that the visually
impaired children were capable of constructing models of the Earth similar in many respects to the models of the sighted children. These results were interpreted to indicate that the blind children, despite the lack of visual stimuli, received adequate information from their other senses and from their socio-cultural environment to create an adequate mental representation of the Earth. Nevertheless, the results also indicated that the visually impaired children had many more difficulties than the sighted children in understanding the normative model of a spherical earth in space, supporting the hypothesis that the blind children experience a developmental lag.