Introduction

            Being successful and being first in place have become prevalent among students. For instance, in most educational systems, school age children are constantly compared, and given the idea that they should aim to get high scores. We see this completion in higher education institutions as well. University students are continually encouraged to do extra and go ahead of others.  However, students are compared as if everybody has equal conditions. One of the things that breaks the equality, for example, is physical disability that affects learning process, such as visual impairment. A visual impaired person is defined as someone whose eyesight cannot be corrected to a normal level” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015).

In order to obtain knowledge fully, we need five senses which are taste, visual, hearing, smelling and feeling. Because brain gets the information and understand the statements with five main senses (Tarhan, 2016), it can be understood that these senses have essential importance in the academic success. As academic success is highly related with career development (Choi, Kim, & Kim, 2015), they can also lead to struggles with career choices.

According to Hodes (2014) vision is the most important aspect in learning and education, but two million children suffer from uncorrected refractive errors each year in the United States. So it can be concluded that visual disabilities are the most effect on learning rather than other sensory organ’s disabilities. Experts from American Academy of Ophthalmology (2010) explain that low vision (visual impairment) defines as loss of eyesight. That means there is a difficulty in reading, writing or any other daily activities. Similarly, Bahar (2015) states that visual impaired students may have matching problems and different muscle and motor development rather than normal sight people.

Basically, there are some solutions which can recover or reduce visual impairments with glasses, contact lenses, or operation, but that is limited. Visual aids don’t fully help visually impaired people, all the time or not everybody has a chance to get an eye operation (age-related or monetary reasons).  In fact unless people get an operation, visual impairment may not be reduced or prevented by using contact lenses or glasses. Besides the problem can increase. Related to this very problem, Bahar (2015) says that visual impairment have significant place in the classrooms. This is the reason why teachers have a responsibility to provide suitable physical atmosphere for their students.

In the education field, there are several innovations can be observed to increase the academic success especially for the disabled people.  For example in order to reduce troubles, “peer work” has been created which includes two different help styles, “physical help” and “academic help” are beneficial for students to share academic knowledge (Çırpan and Çınar, 2013). Teachers’ special curriculum can also be helpful for school success. So that, for the visual impaired students teachers should prepare some specific exercises or organize different activities. Because students can be more dependent to teachers, teachers have an important impact on students’ success.

The aim in this research study is to understand the effect of sense impairments in academic success. To specify the research and understand the relationship between visual impairments and academic success, the following research question was asked

• Is there any difference between visually impaired students and not visually impaired students in terms of academic self-efficacy?

Research also aims to observe benefits of using glasses or contact lenses for academic success by asking open ended questions. 

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