The Value of UDL in Assessment
Embedded, flexible, ongoing assessments have the potential to resolve many of the problems with standardized, paper-and-pencil tests, particularly as tools for guiding teaching. It is true that standardized tests can yield valuable information, especially if one is evaluating trends and information about groups, but as accurate assessments of individual students' skills, knowledge, and learning, these assessment tools are severely flawed.
The obvious value of embedded, flexible UDL assessment is its ability to adjust to many individual differences and focus the questions on exactly what teachers are trying to find out. With flexibility in presentation, expression, supports, and engagement, we can reduce the common errors introduced by single-mode fixed assessments. Further, that same flexibility allows teachers to align assessment more closely with teaching goals and methods and thus, to assess students more accurately.
For example, if you are assessing the ability to create a coherent narrative, you can offer a wide assortment of media for that composition including recorded speech, images, video, animation, or dance. If you are assessing the ability to write a coherent narrative (i.e., create one in text), you can scaffold spelling, reading, and text entry (either through voice recognition or word processing) and provide additional media, like images and sounds, to scaffold motivation and enhance the narrative. If you are assessing mastery of writing mechanics, you wouldn't scaffold these skills, but you might offer motivational supports such as the use of sound or images, and you might provide prompts to help students self-monitor and build editing skills. The interactive capacity of new technologies allows teachers to provide dynamic assessments that assess the ongoing processes of learning more organically. By tracking the supports
a student uses, the kinds of strategies that he or she follows, the kinds of strategies that seem to be missing, and the aspects of the task environment that can bias the outcome, we can gain valuable insights about students as learners.
Assessments in our digital age should be dynamic and universally designed. When we provide a full range of customizations and adaptations as a part of assessments, we are able to more accurately evaluate both student performance and the processes that underlie that performance. The enhanced accuracy comes from the capacity to evaluate performance over time, under varying conditions, including conditions where the student's performance is constrained by barriers inherent in specific modes of representation, expression, or engagement, and conditions where appropriate adaptations and supports are available to overcome those barriers.
Most important, new technologies allow for two-way interactive assessments. With these technologies available in our classrooms, we will be able to create learning environments that not only teach, but also "learn" to teach more effectively. By distributing the intelligence between student and environment, the curriculum will be able to track student successes and weaknesses and monitor the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of its own methods. The result will be a curriculum that becomes smarter, not more outdated, over time.
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With clear goals, flexible methods and materials, and embedded, dynamic assessment, we have seen the three major parts of UDL instructional design. How can this vision become real in classrooms across the nation and around the world? In the next chapter, we propose both top-down and bottom-up approaches to making Universal Design for Learning a reality.
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