comparison of developmental status of spatial orientation of visually impaired students with normal students

Background: orientation means the personal ability to use the senses to determine one’s location and what relationship he/she has with environmental objects and persons. this ability is important for a blind person, so the purpose of this study was to review the developmental status of spatial orientation of students with visual impairments compared with normal ones. methods: subjects of this descriptive-comparative study were 8 - 12 year old students selected from public schools of kermanshah. they included 65 students in a cluster-random way as the healthy group. thirty children with a visual acuity between 0.05 and 0.4 diopter as the low vision group and 16 ones withmaximumvisual acuity of 0.04 diopter as the blind group were included from rehabilitative centers. their spatial orientation capability was measured by throwing a ball towards a target and counting the dribbling of a basketball for 15 seconds. analysis of data was performed by spss software in descriptive and perceptional statistics (one-way anova and post hoc tests). results: statistical results showed that there was no significant difference among the 3 groups in throwing the ball towards the target but there was a difference in the other test. conclusions: there was no significant difference in the test of throwing a ball towards the target indicating corrective and compensatorymechanisms, but in dribbling the ball test there were significant differences among the three groups, and the healthy children compared with the visually impaired ones were in a better condition to show the importance of visual receptors for obtaining information from the surroundings.