Teaching and Assessing the Appropriateness of Uncontracted Braille

Teaching and Assessing the Appropriateness of Uncontracted Braille Tina S. Herzberg, Laura M. Stough, and Carolyn M Clark During the past 50 years, teachers have used contracted braille as the preferred method of teaching reading to children and adults. Contracted braille, previously referred to as grade 2 braille, involvesthe use of the traditional alphabet, along with 189 different characters and contractions that represent a group of letters or whole words (Ashcroft, Henderson, Sanford, & Koenig, 1994). Over 450 rules govern the use of these contractions (Miller & Rash, 2001). Learning contracted braille is often complicated for young or beginning readers. Mangold (2000, p. 16) explained that "the cognitive demands of young blind children are greater than those required of their sighted peers if all of the contractions are presented during the first year of school. " Beginning readers are also distinctly challenged because so much of their time and attention is spent decoding braille contractions that their comprehension of text is affected (Knowlton & Wetzel, 1996). Troughton (1992) suggested that reading contracted braille involves more intellectual exertion than does reading uncontracted (previously referred to as grade 1) braille and therefore leaves fewer cognitive resources available for interpreting text. Learning contracted braille also appears to be particularly challenging for persons with learning disabilities or other cognitive impairments. In a national survey of 1,663teachers, the majority of the sample (54.1%) attributed the recent decline in braille literacy to the increase in the number of students with multiple disabilities (Wittenstein & Pardee, 1996). Nolan and Kederis (cited in Miller & Rash, 2001, p. 23) similarly noted that "for students whose IQ is below 85, braille is an extremely inefficient medium of communication" and suggested that for students with cognitive impairments, learning contracted braille may be simply unfeasible. Teaching students to read uncontracted (also known as alphabetic) braille is a recent movement led by consumers and educators in the field of braille literacy (Mangold, 2000) and is one of several alternative braille methods. The uncontracted method represents each letter of the alphabet with a corresponding braille symbol. Contractions and the rules that govern them are not used. Teachers have informally reported that this method is easy to incorporate into inclusive classroom activities and leads to increases in reading rates and accuracy (Mangold, 2000). Research on uncontracted braille is limited, a notable exception being Troughton's (1992)work. (The recent Hong & Erin [2004] study on early exposure to uncontracted braille was not published at the time we did our study and analyzed our findings.) In a study of 124 participants who had already mastered contracted braille, Troughton found that 113 (91%) of them had higher speed and accuracy in reading and writing uncontracted braille than they did in reading contracted braille, despite their familiarity with the contracted method. Troughtman also found that in participants with learning disabilities, 98% performed better when reading with uncontracted braille. It may be that uncontracted braille allows readers who are challenged by contracted braille to access a higher level of text. Braille literacy experts have suggested the use of uncontracted braille as an instructional strategy for assisting students with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments (Miller & Rash, 2001). Sanspree (1998) implied that learning uncontracted braille would especially aid students with multiple disabilities, since reading,