The development of a
new
test of children’s
braille-reading ability
by J. Greaney, C. Arter,
This article outlines
E.
Hill, H. Mason, S. McCall, J. Stone and M. Tobin
project (School of Education, University of Birmingham) which aims to develop a
test
of children’s braille-reading skills. The Project Management Group has decided
comprehensive
to adapt the new print Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (1989) for braille users. This diagnostic test of
prose-reading ability yields measures of reading speed, accuracy and comprehension. When adapting
narratives for use by braillists, several key areas require careful consideration including assessing
comparative difficulties, capitalization and the replacement of pictures. These areas are addressed, as
well as other matters concerned with the standardization sample and the rationale behind the decision
to opt for the Neale test.
a
new
The RNIB is currently funding work at the University
of Birmingham on the development of a new test of
children’s braille-reading ability. The braille tests now
in use in Britain were standardized some years ago
(Tooze, 1962; Lorimer, 1962, 1977). The first two of
these tests are straightforward word recognition tests;
while the last test is a more comprehensive analysis
of reading skills. The Tooze Braille Speed Test consists
of 120 three-letter words, with no contracted forms.
The number of words correctly identified within a
minute can be converted into a reading-age or
a standardized score. The Lorimer Braille Recognition
Test was designed to test a child’s ability to recognise
words containing braille contractions. It contains 174
words (making use of 174 of the 189 signs of Standard
English Braille). A child is allowed ten seconds to read
each word and the test is terminated after eight
successive failures. As before, the raw score can be
converted to a reading-age or a standardized score.
Both these word-recognition tests were standardized
with samples of children that encompassed a large
proportion of the population of braille users within the
target age groups. They are quick and easy to administer, but neither test was designed to measure ’higherlevel’ reading skills such as the comprehension of
prose. These issues are addressed, however, in
Lorimer’s adaptation into braille (Lorimer, 1977) of the
original Neale Analysis (1958), which consists of a
series of prose passages of increasing difficulty, and
which permits the simultaneous measurement of
reading speed, accuracy and comprehension skills.
However, the content of some of the passages is now
out of date (e.g. in one narrative a horse and cart are
used to deliver milk). In addition, there is a need to
standardize a new test on the current population of
school-age braille users.
The standardization sample will consist of a high
proportion of the population of school-age braille
users in Britain. Testing every available braille user
will present more problems than when Lorimer did his
field work, since more pupils are now integrated into
mainstream education rather than educated in special
schools. The population of children using braille in
Britain is very small: a recent RNIB survey found that
only fourteen per cent of the 285 visually impaired
children surveyed were able to read braille (Walker,
Tobin and McKennell, 1991). In order to maximize the
size of our sample we aim to test braillists with some
residual vision and braillists with additional handicaps.
The variability of the sample means that extra caution
may sometimes need to be applied when interpreting
test scores. If there are significant differences between
the sub-groups defined by level of residual vision and
presence of additional handicaps, then separate norms
will have to be reported; but this may mean that it will
be impossible to produce fine-grained - e.g. month by
month - distinctions for these sub-groups. As Lorimer
(1977) concluded, the small size of the target population also means that it &dquo;is impossible to obtain the
two or three sufficiently large samples required for the
trials and final standardization of an original test&dquo;. This
points, therefore, to the advisability of adapting an
existing, well-standardized test of visual reading.
One other advantage of such an adaptation is that
it will be possible to compare braille readers’ achievements with those of their fully sighted age-peers. In
integrated settings this will alert teachers to the nature
of the problems encountered by blind pupils as they
strive to become literate in a medium that poses
different challenges and makes different demands
upon the child’s perceptual and cognitive abilities.
Selection of a print test for conversion to braille
After consideration of the relative merits of tests of
oral versus silent reading tests, it was decided to
adapt a test of oral reading ability. The speed of oral
reading is much slower than that of silent reading, and
tests of silent reading are more representative of
everyday reading (except perhaps for very young
children who usually read aloud). However, by measuring oral reading a tester can ensure that every word
has been scanned and decoded, which is not the case
with tests of silent reading. In addition, tests of oral
reading have a greater diagnostic value, which derives
from the assessment of different kinds of reading
errors
(such
as
mispronunciations).
Given that it
was also considered important to
the speed of reading, and that this is not
measured in many tests of visual reading, the most
suitable candidate for conversion to braille seemed to
be the revised version of the Neale Analysis of Reading
Ability (1989). This is one of the most widely used
tests of prose reading ability in Britain which can be
used for children in the range 5-13 years. It yields
three performance measures (speed, accuracy and
comprehension) which can be converted into reading
ages. These measures allow a tester to compare a
child’s progress relative to national ’norms’ (averages).
measure
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The story-book format of the Neale Analysis is familiar
to children and the test is popular with teachers.
Measures of reading ability
Reading speed. Braille users typically read at about a
third of the pace of sighted children reading printed
text (see, for example, Nolan and Kederis, 1969). One
of the reasons for this may be the smaller ’perceptual
window’ afforded by tactual perception: braille cells
have to be read one after another whereas most
printed words can be processed as a whole ’at a
glance’. This fact has several implications for the
design of tests of braille-reading ability. For example,
in the braille version of the original Neale test, the
time limit for the recognition of individual words was
extended from four seconds to twelve seconds
(Lorimer, 1977).
Reading accuracy. The errors made while reading
provide useful diagnostic information. The print Neale
Analysis classifies errors into six categories: mispronunciations, substitutions, refusals, additions,
omissions and reversals.
incorrectly pronounced
only partially decoded. They
provide important diagnostic information on the way
Mispronunciations
words
or
words that
are
are
child attempts to decode the main features in a
word. Dialect and accent differences from Standard
English are acceptable and are not counted as errors.
If a child is unable to attempt a word and pauses for
approximately four to six seconds, the word is supplied
and this failure is recorded as a refusal. Words, or
parts of words, inserted into the narrative are recorded
as additions. Words omitted from the text are also
counted as errors. If a real word is used instead of
the word in the narrative, then this is recorded as a
substitution error. Reversal errors (e.g. ’no’ for ’on’)
are, strictly speaking, substitutions, but they are
recorded separately because of their diagnostic value.
Certain sorts of errors are unique to braille. For
example the braille for the letter ’e’ is the reverse
(mirror image) of ’i’. Other ’braillisms’ can arise from
the confusion between upper and lower cell signs, or
from missing dots. Accuracy will also be influenced
by knowledge of contractions and short form words.
We aim to develop our own supplementary diagnostic
tests to provide more information about the specific
areas of braille-reading difficulty.
Knowledge of the braille code would seem, therefore, to be an important asset for testers, and specific
training courses may need to be provided for those
testers not already familiar with braille. This will be an
issue to address in the final stages of the project when
the test Manual is being prepared.
a
Reading comprehension. Since fast and accurate
reading is possible without total understanding of the
content, it is desirable to measure comprehension
skills. In the Neale Analysis, comprehension ability is
measured by asking the child several questions after
the passage has been read. These questions are
mainly concerned with memory for details of the
passage rather than for inferences about the story. It
is worth noting that the comprehension questions of
Form 2 may suffer from an inappropriate gradation in
difficulty. Stothard and Hulme (1991) administered the
Neale Analysis to a group of thirty 10-year-old children
and found that significantly more comprehension questions were answered correctly for level 6 than for
level 5.
Although the simultaneous measurement of speed,
accuracy and comprehension makes the test quick to
administer, it is certainly true that these measures are
not strictly independent; and the validity of allowing
them to vary together in an uncontrolled manner has
been questioned (Vernon, 1965). Testing with the Neale
Analysis is terminated when 16 errors have been made
on a given narrative, with reading speed and comprehension being measured up to that point then, rather
than independently. A good reader may attempt the
more difficult passages and read them at a much
slower rate than the previous passages, thus depressing his or her overall rate score, relative to a reader
who stopped on the previous passage. We are considering the possibility of timing each individual passage to take this effect into account.
Tobin (1994) has observed that the test can be
terminated before a child’s comprehension ability limit
has in fact been reached, especially at the lower levels
of speed and accuracy performance. In such cases it
may be of interest to continue beyond the passage in
which the ’error ceiling’ has been reached by giving
oral corrections of mis-pronounced words, and asking
the comprehension questions at the end of the passage. This procedure can often reveal that visually
impaired pupils’ comprehension scores are on a par
with their chronological ages, even though their speed
and accuracy scores are well below that of their fully
sighted peers (ibid.)
Converting
a
print test to braille: issues under
consideration
In addition to ensuring that the content of none of the
passages is unduly dependent on visual experience,
several other key areas require careful consideration.
Some of these are discussed below:
Contractions and short form words. In Grade 2 braille
letters and letter combinations stand for frequent
orthographic clusters and words. This means that the
braille forms of the parallel versions will not necessarily
be of equal difficulty. Lorimer (1977) attempted to
assess the braille code difficulty for each of the three
versions of the original Neale Analysis by grouping the
contractions and abbreviations into eight categories
designated by Ashcroft (1960). The abbreviations may
be treated as one group, and the contractions can be
sub-divided into several categories according to
whether they are stand-alone word signs, initial contractions (preceded by dot 5, dots 4-5, or dots 4-5-6)
or final contractions (preceded by dots 4-6, dots 5-6,
or dot 6). Lorimer reported that &dquo;the distribution of
easier and harder signs was approximately the same
in each series of narratives&dquo;; but it may still be the
case that the number of contractions occurring at one
level in one version of the test may not be the same
as in the parallel level in another version.
A more comprehensive analysis of difficulty would
also take account of the order in which the contractions are introduced in braille reading schemes. Since
there are no definite guidelines for the sequence of
introduction of these contractions, this analysis is not
straightforward and will require detailed consideration.
One suggestion now being considered is that the final
some
55
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version of
test might incorporate a preliminary
diagnostic test of contractions and abbreviations
appearing in a passage to ensure that a child is familiar
with them. Such a ’screening’ test might be used, for
example, with young readers tackling the later passages, or with very young readers attempting just the
first passage.
our
Use of the capital letter sign in braille. Any possible
changes in the braille code have to be taken into
account in order to ensure the test will be applicable
for the foreseeable future. The Braille Authority of the
United Kingdom (BAUK) is now discussing a proposal
to use the capital letter sign as a matter of routine
practice. We are presently surveying the extent to
which capitals are used in schools. One advantage in
favour of capitalization is that it enables blind children
to produce print output (via transcription software)
that is equivalent to that of their sighted peers. Khan
and Kirkland (1986) conducted a small-scale study
which found that children preferred capitals to no
capitals, and that the presence of capitals did not
significantly influence reading speed or comprehension. This finding is perhaps not surprising, since the
conducted in Canada, where capitals are
used as a matter of course, and the children may have
responded more favourably to what they were accustomed to. The use of capitals may be less advisable
with poorer readers, where any advantages could be
outweighed by the additional perceptual and cognitive
burdens imposed by having to decode an extra sign
and learn new rules.
study
was
Replacement of pictures. In the Neale Analysis, each
passage is accompanied by a picture, the function of
which is to promote interest and set the scene for the
story. In order to compensate for the loss of pictures,
composed introductory sentences to
by the tester before each narrative.
Great care was taken not to use words that appeared
in the actual test passage. We are currently planning
research to assess the degree to which pictures
influence reading comprehension, as well as developing criteria for the composition of the introductory
Lorimer (1977)
be read aloud
sentences.
Conclusions
In
developing a new braille-reading test, we hope to
provide an up-to-date method for monitoring reading
progress and diagnosing difficulties in reading. The
final test will include a teacher’s manual about how to
administer the test, interpret the scores and use the
diagnostic information gathered. The new braille reading test should meet the needs of teachers; and the
authors would greatly value comments from teachers
and other professionals on this article.
References
Ashcroft, S.C. (1960), Errors in oral reading of braille at elementary
grade level, Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois.
Khan, S.B. and Kirkland, K.H. (1986), A study of the influence
of capitalization/no capitalization in braille on the reading comprehension and reading speed of braille-using elementary and
secondary school students, The W. Ross MacDonald School for the
Blind, Bradford, Ontario, Canada.
Lorimer, J. (1962), The Lorimer Braille Recognition Test, College of
Teachers of the Blind, Bristol (now available from the Association
for the Education and Welfare of the Visually Handicapped (VIEW)).
Lorimer, J. (1977), Neale Analysis of Reading Ability adapted for
with blind children, NFER, Windsor.
Neale, M.D. (1958), The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, Macmillan
Education, London.
use
Neale, M.D. (1989), The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Revised
British Edition), NFER-Nelson, Windsor.
Nolan, C. and Kederis, C. (1969), Perceptual factors in braille word
recognition, American Foundation for the Blind, New York.
Tooze, F.H.G. (1962), The Tooze Braille Speed Test, College of
Teachers of the Blind, Bristol (now available from the Association
for the Education and Welfare of the Visually Handicapped (VIEW)).
Stothard, S. and Hulme, C. (1991), A note of caution concerning
the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Revised), British Journal of
Educational Psychology, 61, 226-229.
Tobin, M.J. (1994), Assessing visually handicapped people: an
introduction to test procedures, Fulton, London.
Vernon, M.D. (1965), Neale Analysis of Reading Ability; in Buros,
O.K. (Ed.), The Sixth Mental Measurements Year Book, Gryphon,
New
Jersey.
Walker, E., Tobin, M.J., and McKennell, A. (1992), Blind and
partially sighted children in Britain: the RNIB survey (Volume 2),
HMSO, London.
J. Greaney, C. Arter, E. Hill, H. Mason, S. McCall,
J. Stone and M. Tobin are all members of the
academic staff, School of Education, University of
Birmingham and of the Project Management
Group.
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