Subject hears the guide walking in front of him or standing at the next landmark. Subject sees the guide walking in front of him or standing at the next landmark. Guide walks behind. Subject is told to go to the next landmark. Although this order of qualitative changes appears very clearly when competence in travelling the route was achieved, we found no consistency in learning progression across help levels.
Several explanations is possible.
Firstly, we realized that manual, visual, auditory or verbal help are types of help that may occur at any level before independence in travel depending on the attention and search routines of the pupil. Secondly, when focussing on types of help we did not explicitly distinguish between help directed towards the goals and the attention towards the instructor. Thus help like snapping the fingers while walking in front of the pupil and knocking on the landmark or shoreline were both scored as auditory help. Snapping the fingers, however, tends to direct the attention towards the instructor, while knocking on landmarks tends to direct the attention towards the landmark. We thus to some extent lost the ordinal characteristics of the scale which prevented a clear pattern of the learning progression in the route.