Science Scope—Fall 2023
(Volume 46, Issue 7)
By Tiffany Wild, Tina Herzberg, and L. Penny Rosenblum
Students with visual impairments are often the only students at their school who read braille. They often do not participate in science fairs, in some cases because of low expectations on the part of educators and in other cases because of accessibility challenges. Yet science fairs are a valuable way for students to build skills (Welsh, Hedenstrom, and Koomen 2020). The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) focus on engineering design in the middle school years while testing models where only one variable is changed from trial to trial (NGSS Lead States 2013). The emphasis is on design and communicating about the data gathered, analyzed, and interpreted. With adaptations, students with visual impairments can, and do, learn these skills.