CAST: Universal Design for Learning

CAST to NCLB Commission: There's a Way to 'Leave No Child Behind'

Chief Scientist David Rose makes case for universally designed approaches 

Wakefield, Mass., August 2, 2006 --Today CAST Chief Scientist and Co-Founding Director David Rose told the bipartisan Commission on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that applying Universal Design for Learning principles is the best way to ensure that all children, including those with disabilities, have equal opportunities to a high-quality education.

"A universally designed approach is the most practical way to deliver on the great promise of NCLB, not only for students with disabilities but for all students -- without exception and without retreat," said Rose. 

Rose's remarks came during a roundtable discussion of NCLB's impact on children with disabilities hosted by the Commission at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC. He was one of a handful of education experts invited to speak at the roundtable.

The blue-ribbon Commission -- cochaired by former US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes -- is working to indentify the law's successes and failures. After a year of hearings, analysis and research, it will report its findings to Congress and the President in early 2007 and recommend changes to the NCLB, the primary federal law covering elementary and secondary education.

David Rose's full statement is as follows:

Thank you for asking me to participate in this roundtable today. My name is David Rose. I am Chief Scientist at CAST—the Center for Applied Special Technology—and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

My colleagues and I founded CAST in 1984 with the goal of expanding educational opportunities for all students, but especially those with disabilities, by joining research-based, best practices in education with powerful new multimedia technologies. The resulting framework, which we call Universal Design for Learning, underlies our research and development, all of which is focused on creating more effective learning environments for all students. Our work is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and many national and local foundations.

The term “universal design” originated in the field of architecture two decades ago, and represented a radical change in the way that buildings were designed. In the old days, buildings had been designed without considering the needs of individuals with disabilities.  This method of design resulted in costly after-the-fact adaptations, repairs, and modifications as barriers became obvious, restrictive, and eventually illegal.  With the arrival of universal design, architects learned to build in alternative means of access, right from the start, so that buildings were more useable and accessible for people with disabilities.  In reality, these features—like curb-cuts, ramps, and automatic doors—now benefit a much wider population, from cyclists to parents with strollers.  

Likewise, Universal Design for Learning applies the same concept to learning. By designing learning environments from the outset to meet the challenge of individual differences, including the challenges of students with disabilities, we make better learning environments for everyone.  

As an example, consider the most common learning technology in classrooms—the textbook.  In its regular print version, a textbook raises many barriers for students who have disabilities or other differences.  Students who are blind, dyslexic, or English Language Learners, for example, find many barriers to learning in such textbooks.  Through Universal Design for Learning, we design digital textbooks that are much more flexible and supportive for students with disabilities—they can easily be transformed into refreshable Braille for students who are blind, can speak themselves aloud for students with dyslexia, can provide vocabulary support for English Language Learners, and can provide cognitive supports for students with intellectual disabilities.  These new kinds of universally designed books are now being published by commercial publishers like Scholastic and Pearson, and form the basis for public policy changes like NIMAS (see below).

With that introduction, I would like to turn my attention to NCLB and its future for students with disabilities.

NCLB and Students with Disabilities

The principles upon which NCLB is based are enormously promising for students with disabilities. The intent of my remarks is to suggest means of implementations that will more fully realize their benefits.

I will take several of the central principles on which NCLB is based as the organizational structure of my remarks, considering in each case what is important for students with disabilities, and then considering changes in implementation that will more fully realize their power.

Overall, I will conclude that a universally designed approach is the most practical way to deliver on the great promise of NCLB, not only for students with disabilities but for all students—without exception and without retreat.

Principle 1: Increased Accountability

Why increased accountability is important for students with disabilities:

There is no group of students for whom increased accountability is more critical than students with disabilities.  In fact, the lack of mainstream accountability for these students, starkly visible in their separation from mainstream educational expectations, programs, teachers, and assessments, has been one of the greatest impediments to their progress.  Not being measured has often meant that they have not counted.  For those reasons, we strongly support the accountability provisions of NCLB, including the focus on AYP, annual assessments, and especially the provisions that call for attention and accountability for the “disaggregated” groups especially including students with disabilities. 

How to implement increased accountability for students with disabilities:

Accountability requires one thing above all: accurate measurement of results.  Without accurate measurement, accountability systems are not only ineffective, they are unethical. Unfortunately, the measurement systems in common use—including most standardized tests—have typically not been designed to measure results accurately for students with disabilities; they have not been designed, developed, validated or standardized for that use. Many of them are demonstrably inaccurate or patently inappropriate. As a result, teachers or aids typically modify or adapt those assessments as well as they can.  Most of these local adaptations are not systematic, are not based on research, and often abrogate the standards and methods upon which the assessment was originally based.

To form an adequate foundation for increased accountability, the first step is to use assessment systems that are designed from the outset to be accessible to students with disabilities and to accurately measure their progress.  Improved measurement will require two things: 1) a more varied set of measures—not just multiple choice test items - in order to adequately sample the full range of knowledge and skills that students need to master; and 2) measures which have been designed, from the outset, to be accurate across a wide range of students, including those with disabilities.  Such measurement systems will be universally designed, and better for ALL students.

Principle 2: Increased Flexibility and Choice

Why increased flexibility is important for students with disabilities:        

Parents and teachers of students with disabilities, especially students with significant disabilities, often have fewer choices than typically achieving students.  There are advocates for increasing available choice through alternatives in the place where education occurs. But most alternative places— private and parochial schools, and even charter schools or innovative programs in the public system—simply lack the capacity or the inclination to educate children with significant disabilities. Those choices of place are often hollow ones, choices only of more places that are ill suited or motivated to meet the challenge of students with disabilities. 

A more fundamental type of flexibility is needed to give meaningful choices. To meet the challenge of diversity, teachers and parents need pedagogical options and alternatives. Instead they find themselves with only rigid and narrow curricula, teaching tools that are “one size fits all.”  Faced with high standards, students find that all too often there is only one path to reach those standards, a single path that has not been designed with them in mind, and a path that has many inadvertent obstacles and barriers along the way.  In this case, the learning environment itself, not the student, is disabled: it cannot successfully provide students with the equal access to learning that they by law and by right deserve.

How to implement increased flexibility for students with disabilities:

The flexibility that is most important to students with disabilities (and their parents and teachers) is in the core curriculum, in actual teaching and learning. To succeed, students with disabilities need flexibility in the way that essential content is presented, flexibility in the means of responding and expression that are required, flexibility in the means by which they are motivated and engaged. These kinds of flexibility are essential options that can reduce barriers and provide alternative paths to the same high standards as other students, and they are the options that will have the most profound effects on the education of students with disabilities.

An important first step in ensuring this flexibility has recently been signed into federal law—the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS).  This standard requires that publishers of print materials, e.g. textbooks, must provide flexible alternatives—digital versions—for students with “print disabilities.”  These alternatives provide alternate paths to the same high standards for students who cannot see or successfully decode traditional textbooks. Such alternatives are essential for students with disabilities to reach the same high standards as their peers.

A rigid, one size fits all, learning environment is a disabled learning environment.  Lacking the flexibility and choice that is a central principle of NCLB, “one size fits all” curricula limit educational opportunities for most students, and erect barriers that disable many.  Increased flexibility is at the heart of all good education and must be at the core of the curriculum.  Providing such flexibility is the fundamental premise of universal design for learning. 

Principle 3: Increased Use of Evidence-Based Practices

Why increased use of evidence-based practices is important for students with disabilities.

Most general education curricula lack a foundation of research-based practices that apply to students with disabilities. These students, already identified as atypical learners, are usually subjected to the same general methods and materials as “regular” students in spite of evidence that such practices are unlikely to achieve results, and even in the face of obvious mismatches—e.g. a dyslexic student being taught history or science with a textbook far above their reading fluency level or a blind student who cannot get a digital or Braille version of their physics book.  When accommodations for students with disabilities are included in general curricula, they usually are nonsystematic or address peripheral issues—e.g. non-systematic “tips” in the teacher’s editions to use alternative activities or groupings—rather than research-based practices that are inherent to the curriculum itself. The result of such practices is an increase in the number of students who are misidentified as unable to learn in many basic and content areas.  In reality, there has been too little research on “what works” for students with disabilities within the general curriculum rather than within isolated programs or activities.

How to implement evidence-based practices for students with disabilities:

A wealth of research based practices have proven their effectiveness for students with disabilities.  Unfortunately these practices have been researched and then implemented primarily, if at all, in special education and supplemental programs, not in the mainstream educational curriculum. As a result, students with disabilities must often fail in the mainstream in order to get access to evidence-based practices that would have prevented their failure in the first place. The important next step in implementing evidence-based practices is to build these practices directly into the general education curriculum.  The practice of universal design for learning does just that, ensuring that evidence-based practices are available in the goals, materials, methods, and assessments of the general curriculum.

Recommendations:

The most important barrier to successful implementation of NCLB lies in the curriculum itself.  In most classrooms, the curriculum is disabled.  It is disabled because its main components—the goals, materials, methods, and assessments—are too rigid and inflexible to meet the challenge of diversity.  Most of the present ways to remediate the curriculum’s disabilities—teacher-made work-arounds and modifications, unnecessary assistive technologies, alternative placements—are expensive and often ineffective for learning. What is needed are curricula—universally designed curricula—that remove those barriers, that provide more flexibility for teachers and students, and that fulfill the promise of NCLB.

1) To increase the implementation of accountability for students with disabilities:

Encourage the adoption of scientifically validated, universally designed, assessment systems (more than just accessible multiple choice tests) that can accurately measure progress for all students, including those with disabilities.  Ensure that measurement systems are not only accurate for students with disabilities, but that they are timely, frequent, and embedded enough in the curriculum to measure progress and inform instruction adequately for all students. 

2) To increase flexibility and choice for teachers, parents, and students:

Encourage the adoption of scientifically validated, universally designed, curricula in all subjects - curricula that are flexible and adaptive enough to provide high expectations for every student and multiple paths to sustain those high expectations.  Creating such curricula and learning materials, and properly training teachers in the principles and practices of universal design, will ensure that parents, teachers, and students have meaningful choices. 

3) To increase the use of evidence-based practices:

Encourage the development and research validation of universally designed curricula—curricula that embed research-based practices and flexibility for students with disabilities directly into core curricular methods and materials. 

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