Assessment of Intelligence of Visually Impaired Children: Exploratory Study of Fitness for Items

The aim of this study was to compare the cognitive performance of visually impared and disabled children, as well as to analyze the influence of group and education level through the Intelligence Assessment Battery for Visually Impaired Children (baic-dv), justifying the importance of specific instruments for the targeted population. The instrument was applied to 14 visually impaired children 7-12 years (m = 10.28; sd = 1.58), six female, ten classified with low sight (eight with congenital disabilities, acquired two) and four with total blindness (two acquired, two congenital); and 17 children with normal vision (m = 9.94 years; sd = 1.43; all female). We evaluated the total of correct answers, runtime and influence of sex, age and education. The results showed better performance of sighted and children with congenital deficiency in relation to children with acquired deficiency. Children with low vision outperformed the blind. The influence of education variables on Verbal subtest and sex variable was noted on the memory subtest. Concluding, the specific instrument for visually impaired children was considered important, there is given the scarcity of instruments for this purpose in the Brazilian scientific literature.