The Universally Designed Curriculum: Access, Participation, and Progress in the General Curriculum: What is UDL?: NCAC: CAST

It has been said many times that if a person from the 1800�s were to observe our culture now, the only thing that would look the same would be the schools. In contrast, were a teacher or parent of student with a disability from 1970 able to view the current status of special education, he or she would be amazed at how far we have come. So much more is known about these students and the approaches, tools, and contexts that help them learn. Policy changes have brought unprecedented opportunities, and innovative ideas and approaches are continually developing. Yet, there are still flaws and shortcomings in the overall approach to special education.

The general curriculum is still largely designed to serve a core group of students exclusive of students with disabilities. Even when publishers explicitly include techniques for diverse learners, those diverse learners are considered as outliers and exceptions. These exceptions include not only students with disabilities but also students with exceptional talents, those whose native language is not English, and many others.

The assumption that there is a "core" group of learners that is mostly homogeneous, outside of which other learners fall, is itself flawed. Common sense, and increasingly neuroscience, tells us that learners considered to be within a group are at least as diverse along various dimensions affecting learning as are learners considered to be in different groups (Rose & Meyer, 2002). In fact, we know that myriad subtle differences make each learner unique.

The post hoc retrofitted solutions that spring from the assumption of homogeneity consume much time and money, with only modest effectiveness. These drawbacks stem from the mistaken view that students with diverse learning needs are "the problem," (King-Sears, 1997) when in fact barriers in the curriculum itself are, in our view, the root of the difficulty.

The insights gained from the special curriculum and the mainstream curriculum have been crucial steps along the way to a new more flexible curriculum, the universally designed curriculum. The idea of creating a flexible environment that serves diverse users originated with universal design in architecture. Retrofitting buildings with added-on ramps and automatic doors to accommodate people with disabilities is costly, marginally effective, and often esthetically disastrous. Architects have learned that designing buildings with the needs of diverse users in mind from the beginning saves costs and leads to more streamlined, accessible buildings, in which alternatives are integral to the design. And as it turns out, universal design works better for everyone.

The curb cut is the classically cited example. The curb cut was originally designed to better enable those in wheelchairs to negotiate curbs, but they also ease travel for people pushing strollers or riding skateboards, pedestrians with canes, and even the average walker. Commercial product designers also practice universal design, with similar results. Consider television captioning. When these captions first appeared, individuals who were deaf had to purchase expensive decoder boxes, retrofitting their televisions so that they could access the captions. Later, decoder chips were built into every television, making captions available to all viewers. This universal design feature now benefits not only the deaf but also exercisers in health clubs, diners in noisy restaurants, individuals working on their language skills, and couples who go to sleep at different times. Furthermore, as a built in feature, access to television captioning costs a few cents rather than several hundred dollars (Rose & Meyer, 2002).

In the early 1990�s CAST began to apply the concept of universal design to curriculum materials and methods and coined the term "Universal Design for Learning" or "UDL." The UDL framework helps us to see that inflexible curricular materials and methods are barriers to diverse learners just as inflexible buildings with stairs as the only entry option are barriers to individuals with physical disabilities. If curriculum designers recognize the widely diverse learners in current classrooms and build in options to support learning differences from the beginning, the curriculum as inherently designed can work for all learners. In addition, the need to modify, create alternative versions, and employ assistive technologies is greatly diminished. Universally designed curricula include a range of options for accessing, using, and engaging with learning materials � recognizing that no single option will work for all students (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Universal design for Learning shifts the burden for reducing obstacles in the curriculum away from special educators and the students themselves and leads to the development of a flexible curriculum that can support all learners more effectively.

How can we create a curriculum whose goals, materials, methods, and assessments serve widely diverse learners? To meet that goal, teachers need to offer a large number of alternative ways to access, use, and engage with learning content. In a print-based environment, where there is one "primary" version and others are all alternatives, offering such variety is impractical. Fortunately, digital media and computer technologies make it possible to offer a curriculum that is created once but can be displayed and used in an almost limitless variety of ways. With the power of digital technologies, it is possible to provide a malleable curriculum in which content and activities can be presented in multiple ways and transformed to suit different learners. Thus, with digital content we can provide multiple representations (e.g. image, text and video), transform one medium to another (e.g. text to speech or speech to text), or modify the characteristics of a presentation (e.g. size and color of text, loudness of sound) (Rose & Meyer, 2002; Hitchcock, 2001).

Building a curriculum with inherent flexibility also helps teachers to maintain educational integrity and maximize consistency of instructional goals and methods while still individualizing learning. To see how such a curriculum might work, we highlight key features of UDL goals, materials, methods, and assessments, as derived from CAST�s research and development (Rose & Meyer, 2002; Hitchcock, 2001).

Goals in a UDL curriculum provide an appropriate challenge for all students. UDL goals begin with standards and benchmarks that reflect the knowledge and skills all students will strive for and are carefully conceived and expressed to encourage multiple pathways for achieving them.

To develop a UDL goal, teachers must first and foremost thoroughly understand what they want students to learn. This sounds simple and obvious, but it is not a given. Many times the language of the goal incorporates a specific means for achievement when that means is not in fact what the student needs to learn. In such cases the goals inadvertently specify one acceptable path. Almost any goal can be made inaccessible by unnecessarily limiting the means for reaching it. And conversely, most goals can be achieved if there is flexibility in the means. Human flight is a good example. The goal of human flight is unreachable if the means are limited (e.g. "students will fly using their arms as wings"), but quite attainable if more alternatives are included ("students will fly").

Similarly, if a goal for composition is stated narrowly ("Handwrite a 300 word essay about the challenges faced by Lewis and Clark") then students with motor disabilities and many with learning disabilities are excluded or severely disadvantaged. The same goal stated more broadly ("generate a 300 word essay�") allows students with many disabilities to participate and make progress by using word processors, spell checkers, voice recognition software, and other scaffolds and supports. This rewording reflects a clearer focus on the purpose of the essay, which is to gather, synthesize, and express certain historical information, not to demonstrate penmanship!

Once the true purpose for learning is understood, various means, media, scaffolds, and supports can be used to help students reach the goal without undermining the challenge and the learning. For example, if the goal is for students to understand a mathematical or scientific relationship, students could reasonably employ a variety of media and approaches for gathering and keeping track of information and expressing knowledge. Graphics and video, or digital text with reading supports could be among the many appropriate routes to achieving this goal.

Clear goals also reduce problems likely to arise from inappropriate accommodations and adaptations. If the goal were clearly focused on learning to decode words, then many kinds of reading supports or accommodations that would be appropriate in a history lesson would eliminate the challenge and opportunity for learning to decode. Clear goals enable us to know when alternative methods and materials are NOT appropriate for reaching those goals.

Well-conceived and carefully expressed goals are the foundation of a curriculum in which all students can participate and make progress.

Materials in a UDL curriculum are provided in a flexible format supporting transformation between media and multiple representations of content to support all students� learning.

The critical content at the center of a curriculum, the facts, concepts, information, principles and relationships that are to be learned, must be rendered in some medium. What medium is best? No single medium (e.g. text, voice, images) is accessible to all students. The UDL curriculum offers built in "alternate" or "multiple" representations.

With printed books, the content and its display are inextricably linked; the ink of the text or image is embedded in the page. With digital media, the content can be separated from its display. Thus, the content can be provided once and displayed in a variety of ways. For example, text can be displayed at any size on a screen or in print, as speech, in the context of a concept map, or as Braille (either printed or on a refreshable Braille device), among others. An image can be presented in print or on-screen at any size and with colors modified to increase visibility, as a text or spoken description, or as a summary of the image�s importance and implications for the context in which it is found. Further, this same content can potentially be displayed on various electronic devices such as hand-held computers or even telephones.

This adaptability increases accessibility for students with visual, auditory, reading, or motor impairments because they can elect to view and respond to the content in a medium and means that suit their needs. Students may choose the medium or media most effective for them, as long as the learning goal is not undermined.

Digital content makes possible another important kind of flexibility, the flexibility to embed supports and links. Not only can digital content be displayed in different ways, it can provide optional "smart supports" to be used by individual students as needed. Thus digital documents can include hyperlinks to glossaries, related background information in multiple media, graphics and animations to summarize or highlight key relationships, queries to support strategic thinking, or sequenced supports for step-wise processes, among many others. Embedded supports can also take the form of tools for expression and organization such as a note pad with capacity to store text, recorded voice, and images; or a Q&A tool to ask questions of teachers or peers online.

Digital materials for expression are also far more flexible than their print-based cousins. The power of word processing is by now widely known and used, with its ease of editing and multiple writing tools such as thesauri, spelling and grammar checkers, and dictionaries. Tools to track changes and identify the authors of changes, insert annotations, and merge documents elegantly support collaborative composition. Voice recognition software enables students who type with difficulty or not at all to compose in text. Multimedia tools such as HyperStudio and ClarisWorks offer diverse learners alternatives to composing in straight text, including creating an entire communication using images and sound or recorded voice, or alternately, beginning with images or sound and moving to text once the key ideas are laid out.

Within a UDL curriculum these alternatives are all viable means of expression. Flexible materials fulfill the promise of UDL in that they open doors and circumvent barriers for students with disabilities and also improve learning opportunities for all students � in the same way that universally designed buildings and technologies benefit "mainstream" users. As long as the learning goal is kept in mind and the challenge remains in place, the curriculum should offer rich scaffolds, supports, and alternative ways of obtaining information and expressing ideas. Through these alternatives, all students benefit.

Methods in a UDL curriculum are flexible and diverse enough to provide appropriate learning experiences, challenges, and supports for all students.

Good pedagogy is at the core of a good curriculum. The value of instructional design is in elevating the probability that any one child, and every single child, will learn what is critical to the curriculum. Rather than offering content unsupported and leaving students� success to happenstance, privilege, or random discovery, we teach what is important, and we teach it by adopting the most effective methods so that all children will learn.

In a diverse classroom, no single method can reach all learners. Multiple pathways to achieving goals are needed. In a UDL classroom, teachers support those multiple pathways by presenting concepts in multiple ways, offering students multiple means of expressing their knowledge, and providing a variety of options to support each student�s engagement with learning. Teachers practicing UDL assume that each student needs his or her own "size," and provide options, scaffolds, and further opportunities for in-depth learning as a matter of course. In the examples that follow, we illustrate what could be real, given technologies that exist today, though of course UDL is not yet fully implemented by publishers or by educators.

Using a UDL approach to presenting concepts, teachers offer multiple examples and highlight the critical features that differentiate that concept from others. In a UDL classroom, teachers also assume that students bring varied amounts of background knowledge to a particular concept and offer optional additional background information for those who may lack prerequisite knowledge. Digital technologies could substantially ease this process. Consider for example conveying the critical features of a right triangle. With software that supports graphics and hyperlinks, a teacher could prepare a document that shows:

The document could then be projected onto a large screen in front of the class. Thus, the concept is presented not simply by a teacher explaining it verbally or by a textbook or workbook page, but via many modalities and with options for extra support or extra enrichment.

When supporting strategic learning, teachers using a UDL approach offer models of skilled performance, plentiful chances for students to practice with appropriate supports and ongoing feedback, and opportunities to demonstrate skills in a meaningful social context. These models and supports need to be provided in a number of ways to meet all students� needs. For example, a U.S. History teacher might ask her students to construct an essay that compares and contrasts the industrial north with the agricultural south in the 1800s. Her focus is the thinking behind the essay, the method of comparing and contrasting, as a means to help her students gain deeper understanding of the period and the geographical locations. She emphasizes that there are many different approaches to constructing the essay and offers examples such as outlines, diagrams, concept maps, digitally recorded "think alouds," and drawings. She uses tools that support each of these approaches, so that students who need extra structure can choose the supports that work for them, and she creates templates with partially filled in sections and links to more information. Because this is a long-term assignment, the teacher breaks the research and the writing into pieces and builds in group sharing and feedback to help students revise as they work. The teacher also provides models of the process by sharing the work of previous students who approached the problem in varied ways.

Teachers using a UDL approach recognize that each student will engage with learning for different reasons and in different ways. To support these differences, teachers offer students choices of content and media or tools to work with as long as the learning goal is not compromised. To stay interested and committed to the task at hand students also need an appropriate balance of challenge and support. Vygotsky describes the ideal balance point as where the goal is just beyond reach but achievable with effort, what he calls the "zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978)." Of course, the ZPD is different for different students, and teachers can lower the bar without compromising the goal by supporting students in areas of need that are not germane to the challenge at hand. Optional scaffolds might include offering concept maps highlighting main points and supporting details, showing relationships between events or parts of a complex concept, or stepping learners through an inquiry process. Tools that help students organize their work such as templates (visual or textual), highlighting tools that enable students to code and collect content by categories, and many others, can support organizational or motor difficulties. The learning context can also be adjusted such that collaboration, rather than competition, is emphasized, as in cooperative learning (Slavin et al 1984; Johnson & Johnson 1986; Johnson & Johnson 1989). Offering such varied options supports the motivational and emotional involvement of varied learners in a UDL classroom.

Assessment in a UDL curriculum is sufficiently flexible to provide accurate, ongoing information that helps teachers adjust instruction and maximize learning.

Effective teaching requires accurate knowledge of progress. To obtain this knowledge, we must separate the skill required to use specific media, such as printed text, from the skill or knowledge being assessed. A test given in a single medium inevitably tests mastery of that medium, "Traditional assessments tend to measure things that teachers are not trying to measure (visual acuity, decoding ability, typing or writing ability, motivation) making it impossible to disaggregate the causes of success or failure (Rose & Meyer, 2002)." For students with disabilities who may have difficulty with a particular medium, the test poses insurmountable barriers that have nothing to do with the actual skill or knowledge that is supposedly being evaluated.

Like UDL teaching, UDL assessment requires a clear understanding of the learning goal. With that understanding, teachers can provide scaffolds during an evaluation to help students overcome media-related barriers and show what they really know. Even better, evaluation should be embedded in the materials with which students are working, so that ongoing monitoring and feedback can help them stay on track. CAST�s "Thinking Reader," being developed as part of the "Engaging the Text: Reciprocal Teaching and Questioning Strategies in a Scaffolded Learning Environment" project funded by the US Office of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), offers an early example of embedded assessment. Thinking Reader is a Web-based "supportive reading environment" that embeds strategy supports into digital versions of award-winning children�s literature (Dalton, Pisha, Coyne, Eagleton, & Deysher, 2001). Students respond to prompts embedded in the text that support strategic thinking, and their responses are saved in a reading log that can be viewed and discussed by students and teachers. This kind of embedded assessment is integral to the learning task and provides the same supports that students need while learning. Thus the focus of the assessment matches the focus of the instruction, and students do not face media related barriers. Though much more research is required, this direction is promising and the technology is here to make it possible.

Access, Participation, and Progress in the Universally Designed Curriculum

When implemented, the UDL curriculum will be ideally suited to supporting true access, participation, and progress in the general curriculum for students with disabilities, and indeed, to improving learning opportunities for all students. With the premise that each student can benefit from a flexible curriculum offering clear goals, multiple pathways for reaching those goals, and fair and accurate assessment, the UDL curriculum reflects an understanding that each learner is unique.

Access in a UDL curriculum occurs at many levels. Most basically, because students with disabilities are considered from the outset, many barriers found in the mainstream curriculum are eliminated or very much reduced. By building in flexible options for teachers to convey concepts and for students to express their knowledge, the UDL curriculum increases access for everyone. Thus the goals, methods, materials, and assessments in a UDL curriculum are accessible to all.

There is a tendency to equate access in a curriculum with access to information, or access to activities. But a curriculum is not information or activities, it is a plan for learning, and therefore the learning has to be accessible. After all, the important thing is not whether a particular activity or piece of material (a textbook, a film, a software simulation) is accessible; the important thing is whether the learning for which the material or activity is designed is accessible. That is its purpose in a curriculum. Thus, access needs to be implemented in the context of learning goals.

An example will illustrate. Suppose a student is assigned an Aesop�s fable to read. The purpose of this assignment determines the appropriate steps for making it accessible. Is the goal to learn to decode text, to learn comprehension strategies for extended passages, to build vocabulary, to learn the moral or point of the fable, to learn the common elements of any fable, to learn how to compare and contrast fables with news reports, to articulate the relationship between the fable and the overall culture? The scaffolds and supports that might be appropriate depend entirely on the purpose of the assignment.

If for example the purpose of the fable assignment were to become familiar with the elements commonly found in fables, then supporting word decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension of the story itself would not interfere with the learning challenge. Supports such as text-to-speech, linked vocabulary, or animations illustrating interactions between characters would support different students but still leave the appropriate kind of challenge for all learners. But if the goal were to provide practice in decoding and reading fluency, providing those same supports could undermine the learning challenge and actually impede access to learning. The reading support would eliminate the students� opportunity to practice and work towards reading independence.

Because the alternatives offered in a UDL curriculum could in theory "give away" the point of a lesson, the alternatives and options must be carefully embedded in learning goals in order to preserve true access to learning.

Participation in a universally designed curriculum means true engagement with learning, in pursuit of the goal that is defined for the class as a whole. Clearly articulated goals, communicated and agreed to by students, are the bedrock of a functional UDL curriculum and a prerequisite for true participation. John Dewey long ago articulated the importance of active participation for real learning to take place:

There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active co-operation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying (John Dewey, 1938, p.67).

To build learners� awareness and commitment to their learning purposes, teachers in a UDL classroom make goals clear and help students keep them front and center when working in class or on homework assignments.

More than simple content or skills learning, true participation involves "learning how to learn." The heavy emphasis on content learning observed in the mainstream curriculum is shifted towards the mastery of skills and strategies in a universally designed curriculum, "Learning how to plan, execute, and evaluate a range of tasks from forming single letters to writing a research paper, directing a video production, or creating a Web site� is highly critical to all aspects of learning (Rose & Meyer, 2002)." Skill development is embedded in all content learning activities to provide opportunities to "learn how to learn."

With digital tools, supports for active learning can be built into curriculum materials themselves. In CAST�s "Thinking Reader," features like text-to-speech, leveled prompts and hints for various strategies that are introduced; and a selection of content, challenge, and support, help all learners become more strategic, self-aware, and engaged � critical components to participating in the curriculum.

Progress in a UDL curriculum is centered on curricular goals, not on overcoming curricular barriers. The distracting "proxies" for progress � changes in setting or place, increased participation in activities, reduction of barriers, or success in utilizing accommodations and modifications � are no longer the central focus. Measures of progress for students with disabilities become the same measures as for other students: measures of learning.

This emphasis on the goals for learning is possible because the curriculum is designed to eliminate barriers to access and participation. But eliminating those barriers does not eliminate all effort or challenge in reaching goals, which most significant learning requires. On the contrary, Universal Design for Learning requires that the challenge and resistance essential to real learning be preserved, but properly focused (Rose & Meyer, 2002). The goal of universal design is not to reduce all effort, but to reduce extraneous effort � effort that is unrelated, distracting, disabling � because it is expended in overcoming barriers and poorly designed pedagogies. When goals do not needlessly restrict the pathways to success, all students, even those with disabilities, can make progress with them.

For diverse students to work effectively towards a common goal, the goal must be clearly defined so that teachers can easily identify "allowable" scaffolds, scaffolds that do not interfere with learning, that preserve the challenge. In addition, assessment measures need to have the same scaffolds built into them that students use when working in class. Only then is the evaluation a fair and accurate assessment of what students know and can do in relation to that particular learning goal.

Conclusions Regarding the UDL Curriculum

The UDL curriculum arose in response to a rethinking of a core educational assumption. The assumption that there are two types of learners � those with disabilities and those without disabilities � no longer seemed valid. Simple classroom observations and neuroscience findings show that every learner is unique, rendering these commonly used categorizations artificial � and counterproductive. Retrofitting the mainstream curriculum, although a step forward from the special curriculum perpetuated these categorizations and undersold all students, especially those with disabilities.

The UDL curriculum is meant to satisfy the need and desire to further improve the education of all students, especially those with disabilities. Drawing from the principle of universal design in architecture, the UDL curriculum acknowledges students� tremendous diversity. The curriculum is designed to be flexible enough to meet diverse learner needs from the beginning.

Drawing on technological advances, especially digital media, UDL builds flexibility into each of the four main components of the general curriculum. Clearly stated goals, centered on the true learning purpose, are the cornerstone. Stripped of unnecessary restrictions, UDL goals can permit multiple pathways to achievement. To support these multiple pathways, students use flexible materials � multiple formats and media, with optional supports and scaffolds; teachers offer not one teaching method but many different methods; and assessment is offered in multiple forms, making use of varied media and scaffolds.

Because every student can benefit from a more flexible learning environment, UDL is ideally suited to supporting access, participation, and progress for all learners, not just those with disabilities. When goals are clear and properly focused and materials, methods, and assessment diversified, access is ensured to not merely information but more importantly, to learning. Because goals are not over-specified, they are inclusive of all students, enabling whole-class participation. Moreover, they support the broad skills and strategies fundamental to "learning how to learn." Progress for students with disabilities is no longer merely a matter of overcoming curriculum barriers. For them, as for all other students, progress is defined as advancement towards curriculum goals.

The technologies, tools, and methods built up through the years since the beginning of IDEA have all made it possible to conceive of and to realize UDL. However, there is no such thing as a completely universally designed curriculum. For one thing, the field is too new. For another, universal design is a process rather than an outcome. The intent in practicing universal design is to engage in a process that creates better and better curricula. That process will improve over time, but there will always be room for more improvement, new techniques, and even newly discovered barriers. Consequently, there will always be a need for assistive technologies and other adaptations � the reachable goal is to reduce the need for them substantially in favor of better solutions wherever possible.

One erroneous perception is that a UDL curriculum will immediately reduce the cost of education by bringing special education students into participation in the general curriculum and using one general curriculum for all learners. While costs may be reduced in the long run, once the strategies and the accessible, supportive materials are developed and in place, moving from the current state of affairs to a full implementation of UDL will take time and money. Investments in planning, product development, professional development, teacher collaboration, technology and other aspects of UDL curriculum will be needed in the short run. The allocation of resources to the needs of a special population will result in educational benefits for all students and more than justify the investment.

This Web Site was developed pursuant to cooperative agreement #H324H990004 under CFDA 84.324H between CAST and the Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. However, the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Department of Education or the Office of Special Education Programs and no endorsement by that office should be inferred.