Visually Impaired Children And Normal Children "tower Of Hanoi" Problem-solving Process

The Tower of Hanoi Problem was a classical experimenton problem solving. Three groups were involved in this research, theirgrades ranged from 2 to 5. Group l was blind children, Group 2 wasiormal children covered eyes, Group 3 was normal children.According to different instructions, each group was divided into 3Levels: Metacognition, subjects were asked to tell the reason why they dideach move; Verbalization, subjects were asked to think aloud; Controlledgroup, no special instruction was given. Each subject was asked to solvethe Tower of Hanoi Problem in the condition of disk=2,3,4.The two groupsof normal children were even asked to solve it in disk=5,6.The solutiontime and the amount of moves were recorded. The verbalizations wererecorded too.The results showed that the two groups of normal children did betterthan the blind. It indicated that the lack of sight caused the retardness of theblind children in problem solving. Because of the impaired sight, theirverbal ability thinking ability and the strategy they used in solving HanoiPuzzle were reduced. This result proved the "Defect Hypothesis".The covered eyes subjects did worse than the normal one at thebeginning of this experiment, but when they adapted to the conditionwithout sight, they did as well as the normal group. It indicated that visualexperience influenced problem solving.