During any school day, pupils with visual impairment constantly demonstrate their use of sensory information. They reveal their sensory preferences across a range of learning tasks and show their levels of comfort in using each sense. Sometimes these signals from pupils are ignored or overlooked because of assumptions about what pupils can or cannot see.
So it is really useful and very important to make regular objective observations that will gather information about pupils' natural use of their sensory channels.
To determine the use of sensory channels, the child is regularly observed (ideally from a very young age) by a range of people including the team around the child and the child's family members.
The observations are designed to identify and document the primary and secondary sensory channel(s) that a child uses naturally in authentic environments. Remember that a pupil's natural use of sensory information is not necessarily and indication of the sense(s) that would be most efficient given encouragement, opportunity and instruction.
Collate coded forms from all team members. Review the forms holistically, do not merely count the number of squares and circles on the compiled forms. Remember, this form will not provide a definitive picture of the pupil's most efficient sensory channel, but merely the sense that the pupil uses naturally.
There are many reasons that a child may demonstrate a preference for a sense that is not ultimately deemed to be the most efficient. The most worrying are either that the child has not been given opportunities to develop multisensory skills, or that the child has been pressured or encouraged to use one sense in preference to others that might be more suitable for a task.
If the pattern of behaviours is inconsistent you may wish to group the behaviours into near and distant tasks. This may help identify a pattern to the behaviours. If a consistent pattern is not found you will need to conduct additional observations under more controlled conditions to try to identify the reason for the inconsistency (e.g., behaviour outdoors in sunny conditions or cloudy conditions).
Use information on the pupil's primary and secondary channels as just one piece of data on which to base recommendations on appropriate learning media. Use of Sensory Information (Form 2) is not sufficient for making this important decision.
If a pupil seems to exclude one sensory channel, it is important to investigate whether he/she has had adequate opportunity and encouragement to use that sensory channel. It is important to provide rich and varied experiences for the pupil to use the sensory channel in question.
In this way, you and the team around the child can be confident that you are collecting the right information.