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How it could support students with disabilities or diverse learning needs in specific content areas

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How it could support students with disabilities or diverse learning needs in specific content areas

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Provides clear guidelines, practical tools, and examples to help design flexible, inclusive lessons that meet the diverse learning needs of all students.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Reenvisioning the UDL Guidelines

Because the UDL Guidelines are meant to be informed by feedback from the field as well as new research, they have been updated several times in the past. We are in the process of updating the Guidelines once again in our UDL Rising to Equity initiative.

This update will focus specifically on addressing systemic barriers that result in inequitable learning opportunities and outcomes. CAST aims to develop a transparent, inclusive, and community-driven process. If you are interested in collaborating and staying updated on our progress, we invite you to complete a brief survey.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

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Reviews and summarizes high-quality research to help educators identify evidence-based programs, practices, and interventions that improve student outcomes.

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As an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was created in 2002 to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.

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Emphasizes that mnemonics can be used in the classroom as an effective way to help students with a learning disability remember new information. Highlights several mnemonic strategies and each strategy is outlined and examples are given of how each is used.

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These strategies will be effective in all subjects area, because each requires students to learn and memorize information.

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This article lists the benefits of guided notes, how to create them, and ways to use them. The article adds how maps, charts, and graphs can be incorporated into these notes. The article also adds how guided notes help with cognitive overload, and how not only can they be used for lectures, but also for think-pair-share activities and reading/video notes.

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Ways to break notes down for students off all abilities

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As students, we have all had that experience of attending a lecture, only to find ourselves struggling to keep up with the instructor’s pace, or losing focus due to a lack of organization and structure. This can be frustrating, especially if the content is challenging or unfamiliar. To help students improve their note-taking skills and overall engagement in class, guided notes can be a useful tool.

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An article and an example of modifying presentations during lectures or teaching students how to use note-taking techniques.

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Subjects with presentations and lots of notes

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Boyle, J. (1996). Thinking while note-taking: Teaching college students to use strategic note-taking during lectures. In B. G. Grown (Ed.), Innovative learning strategies: Twelfth yearbook (pp. 9-18). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Boyle, J ., & Weishaar, M. (1998). The effects of strategic note-taking on the recall and comprehension of lecture information for high school students with learning disabilities. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Hughes, C. A. (1996). Memory and test-taking strategies. In D. D. Deshler, E. S. Ellis, & B. K. Lenz (Eds.), Teaching adolescents with learning disabilities (2nd ed., pp. 209-266). Denver, CO: Love.

Hughes, C. A., & Suritsky, S. K. (1994). Note-taking skills of university students with and without learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27, 20-24.

Kiewra, K. A., DuBois, N. F., Christian, D., McShane, A., Meyerhoffer, M., & Roskelley, D. (1991). Note-taking functions and techniques. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 240-245.

Lazarus, B. D. (1991). Guided notes, review, and achievement of secondary students with learning disabilities in mainstream content courses. Education and Treatment of Children, 14(2), 112-127.

Peper, R. J., & Mayer, R. E. (1986). Generative effects of note-taking during science lectures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(1), 34-38.

Putnam, M. L., Deshler, D. D., & Schumaker,J. S. (1993). The investigation of setting demands: A missing link in learning strategy instruction. In L. S. Meltzer (Ed.), Strategy assessment and instruction for students with learning disabilities (pp. 325-354). Austin, TX: PRO- ED.

Suritsky, S. K. (1992). Note-taking approaches and specific areas of difficulty reported by university students with learning disabilities. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 10(1), 3-10.

Suritsky, S. K., & Hughes, C. A. (1996). Note-taking strategy instruction. In D. D. Deshler, E. S. Ellis, & B. K. Lenz (Eds.), Teaching adolescents with learning disabilities (2nd ed., pp. 267-312). Denver, CO: Love.

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Enhancing the Note-Taking Skills of Students with Mild Disabilities

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Teachers can improve the note-taking skills of students with mild disabilities by either modifying their presentation during lectures or teaching students how to use note-taking techniques. This article begins with a vignette and then describes how teachers can modify their lectures and how they can teach note-taking techniques to students.

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Test-Taking: Tips for Students with Learning Disabilities

by Audrey W. Prince, M.Ed.

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HandyHandouts - 97: Test-Taking: Tips for Students with Learning Disabilities

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Super Duper� Publications Handy Handouts� are free, online educational handouts on a variety of special needs and educational topics.

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This is a video I watched in EDTE that goes over a few main strategies for making information easier to remember. These strategies include self-quizzing, interleaving, and spacing.

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Although this video is very broad for all learners. Certain students may need assistance utilizing these three strategies.

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How to Study: MAKE IT STICK by P. Brown, M.McDaniel & H.Roediger III | Core Message

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This source, created by a third grade teacher, gives examples of different mnemonic strategies; keyword method, letter strategies, and the pegword method. Further, it states how these strategies are very helpful for retaining/remembering information for students with learning disabilities.

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Can help all students not just students with learning disabilities

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Canva offers free and easy to customize templates that are engaging and good for different learning styles and learners.

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It can help students organize their ideas in the template they prefer 

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This website explains what mnemonic devices are, the different types of mnemonic strategies and how to create them.

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Music: Use a song to help memorize vocab words and such.

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Because this article shows that there are different types of mnemonics it can be used for a wide variety of learners. For example, they mention acronyms, acrostic, word association, chunking, songs and loci methods. You can share these devices with your classroom and help each student create a mnemonic device that would help them best.

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Mnemonic Devices: Types, Examples, and Benefits

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Mnemonic devices are techniques a person can use to help them with memory.

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Worksheets Work is graphic organizer template website that produces a wide variety of graphic organizers that all disciplines can use as a note taking tool or lesson medium.

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Could be used in all disciplines for easy acesses to scribe the material being presented in class. Gives supports to students' brains to categorize information instead of the traditional lined notebook.

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Tells about the benefits of graphic organizers and describes ways you can improve your organizers to better fit the purpose and aid students

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Planning the topics and formatting information of graphic organizers to help students focus and organize key information

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Reducing stress and confusion among student body

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The visual guides work best when learning goals drive the design and students are engaged in their creation.

Graphic organizers are a helpful learning tool for students of all ages to organize, clarify, or simplify complex information-they help students construct understanding through an exploration of the relationships between concepts.

Teacher-generated organizers are a useful scaffold to support student learning. They provide students with a means to categorize cumbersome amounts of information, introduce a more refined lens to analyze a complex text, and enable students to recognize patterns and compare perspectives. However, graphic organizers can have the unintended consequence of limiting students' thinking to just filling in the boxes, and may allow students to avoid the messy but important work of surfacing key insights or conceptual understanding.

Careful design, creation, and use of graphic organizers can provide important intellectual guardrails to guide students toward deeper understanding and learning.

Let Learning Goals Drive Design

Well-designed graphic organizers should guide students to categorize key concepts, surface the interconnection of ideas, or help students construct knowledge.

For example, if your desired learning objective is to have students explain the paradox that both an overly weak and an overly strong government can threaten individual liberty, the graphic organizer must be constructed to generate that level of thinking. The organizer should ensure that students move beyond the traditional listing of the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. Instead, the design should lead students to thoughtfully analyze how liberty was impacted under the British monarchy and the Articles of Confederation.

Similarly, if the goal is to determine whether an author followed or broke from traditional storytelling conventions, a graphic organizer that outlines the plot elements of a novel would be insufficient. The organizer should require students to compare plot elements from the novel to the typical rising/falling action, climax, and resolution storyline; determine where and why the author made similar or different choices; and offer a judgment regarding the deliberate craft moves.

If the goal is to have students form well-reasoned opinions, the ubiquitous Venn diagram, although a viable means to make comparisons, doesn't automatically require students to weigh the relative strengths of the elements depicted, isolate the most significant similarities or differences, or rate or discriminate between elements that would inform a thoughtful point of view.

Unless they're designed with the end in mind, organizers may unintentionally lead students on an intellectual scavenger hunt that generates surface understanding and thinking. The design of the graphic organizer must align with the learning goal and require that students apply the information they deconstructed in order to make meaning or develop unique insights.

Understand the Why

Imagine asking your students while they're working on a graphic organizer, "What are you doing?" and "Why are you doing it?" It's likely that students would be able to articulate the former (e.g., "I'm filling in this chart/table/diagram.") but not necessarily the latter.

Students tend to view the completion of the graphic organizer as an end in itself rather than a means toward developing a more sophisticated insight. As such, be mindful to design the organizer with the end in mind: Communicate this goal to your learners, and ensure that the structure of the organizer requires students to make connections between content, achieve broader understandings, and perhaps even ask further questions.

A graphic organizer from the National Archives, for example, provides multiple prompts to help students analyze and close read historical documents, consider the author and historical context, and generate additional questions for continued research and reflection.

Make the Student the Designer

Over-scaffolding a graphic organizer means the higher-ordered skills of evaluation, determination, and judgment are used in the design stage by the teacher rather than in the instructional stage by the student.

Shift the intellectual responsibility by asking students to construct their own visual representation. In an example from an AP Biology course (see the pdf "Student Concept Maps"), the teacher provided guidelines and a blank sheet of paper for students to create their own concept maps, which offered flexibility in how they displayed their thinking. Upon reflection, students reported that the act of creating their own organizer enhanced their grasp of the concepts because they had to sift through the information in a more critical way. It also provided a visual that identified gaps in their understanding.

Concept mapping not only allows students to consolidate their thinking but also provides a formative assessment the teacher can use to check for understanding and surface misconceptions.

Design for Transfer

Graphic organizers should ultimately build a student's capacity to draw upon what they learned in order to become independent readers, active citizens, and solvers of complex problems. If this is our goal, students need the opportunity to construct the processes to achieve those ends.

In and out of school, scaffolds are meant to be removed; educators have to be willing to remove the training wheels or temporary platforms and let students become independent learners. Students will continue to encounter text and other content outside of school without the assistance of graphic organizers. Deliberate design and implementation of graphic organizers helps students develop autonomy and complex thinking capacity.

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Increasing the Value of Graphic Organizers

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The visual guides work best when learning goals drive the design and students are engaged in their creation.

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Provides additional strategies that can be used across several content areas to help with memorizing key concepts. The resource also emphasizes the importance of aligning with the principles of UDL (multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement). Includes helpful videos as well.

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Can be incorporated into any content area

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MNEMONIC DEVICES FOR INSTRUCTION: Using Mental Cues for Easy Recall - UDL Modules

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Contents Introduction UDL Alignment Instructional Practice Mnemonic Devices for Instruction Organizational Mnemonics Encoding Mnemonics Learn More Literature Base References & Resources Introduction Mnemonic strategies are commonly used across content areas to help students remember important information or concepts. When we talk about mnemonics, people often think of mnemonic acronyms that enable people to remember items […]