Adapting School Psychological Evaluation to the Blind Child

□ In summary, it is important for the school to have knowledge of individual traits and needs in youngsters if the best educational opportunity is to be offered to all. It is easier to measure the psychological components of the normal child than to measure them in the blind child. From one point of view, the schools are essentially verbal in nature and the verbal areas of intelligence are, therefore, of primary importance in school success. While it is possible to do a wider appraisal of the characteristics of normal children, the difficulties in gaining good insight into the verbal abilities of blind children are not insurmountable. It seems reasonable to accept the idea that it is what the blind child possesses that is important and that certain capacities available to normal children are simply not open to aid blind children in learning in school. We will do better, then, to work with those abilities we can discover than to lament those the organism will never have in normal amount. The Wechsler Pre-School and Primary Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children are so organized that they will yield useful information about the verbal areas of intelligence in the blind. These instruments, properly analyzed, can tell us much about the assets of blind youngsters for learning. There is relatively little that we presently know that can help us measure the neuro-motor component of the blind child. Personality appraisal in the blind child is not greatly different from measuring personality in the sighted child. Paper and pencil tests can be administered with only a little inconvenience. Observation of behavior is, in any case, a more reliable way of understanding the personality of all children, sighted or blind.