Accessing the General Curricululm: Promoting a Universal Design for Learning

A Forum — November 3, 2000

The movement in most states toward standards-based education reform has resulted in an increased emphasis on learning outcomes for all students, including those with disabilities. A universally-designed curriculum makes use of technology to build in flexibility, permitting customized learning experiences for a variety of differently-abled learners. A traditional book is a limited piece of technology that works well for a good number of people, but is ineffective for many others. It can not be used by those who are blind or by those who can not move the pages. CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) work has been focused on finding ways to use technology to ease the problems that disabled learners face. The idea that students with disabilities, given the means, are able to interact with the curriculum, benefit from it, and achieve improved performance drives the work of the National Center for Access to the General Curriculum (NCAC), located at CAST in Peabody, Massachusetts. In this forum, David Rose and Chuck Hitchcock from CAST described how Universal Design, recent neuro-scientific research and technology have been combined to create universally-designed curriculum products for all students.

Universal Design is a concept developed by architects to address the needs of all by building ramps and pathways through structures and designing tools easily accessible to all. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) draws on the insights of recent research that looks at the strengths and weaknesses of individual learners across three functional networks in the brain: recognition, strategy, and affect. UDL uses innovative media technologies to build a curriculum that can respond to individual differences in learning and teaching, and provides adjustable ways of representing information, expressing ideas, and engaging students in their own style of learning. According to David Rose, Co-Executive Director and Principal Investigator at NCAC, CAST, technology in today’s classroom will "make the work of teachers more nutritious for the mind." Technology is making large changes in education, says Rose, especially in the way in which we understand what learning really is.

Rose discussed recent advances in the neuro-sciences field that are beginning to raise awareness of how the brain processes information. Using FMRI/PET scans, scientists were able to view changing patterns of glucose burning-- areas working in the brain. By studying the patterns that light up, or burn glucose, during tasks such as reading, researchers have found that the brain is highly modularized in how it processes information. There are specialized processors that do their own part to "operate like a well functioning ad-hoc committee," as Rose describes it. The distribution of glucose burns is located on one or both hemispheres--in the front, middle or back of the brain during different tasks such as viewing words, listening to words, speaking words or generating verbs. Researchers describe these patterns as signatures and have found that the signatures are highly distributed throughout the brain during various language tasks. There is a heavy burning of glucose while the brain is learning something new, like reading a new word or solving a mathematical equation. After a number of trials later on the same task, there is no longer the intense glucose burn. Re-doing the same task but with slight variation, such as adding new words or numbers burns some glucose, but not to the same extent as when the task was new. With this recent neuro-scientific research in mind, Rose invoked the work of a developmental theorist of the 1960s, Vygotsky’s, whose "zone of proximal development" describes the "distance between the child's actual development level… and the child's level of potential development." Vygotsky’s belief is that to facilitate learning and "bring student engagement to an optimal level of challenge," educators must develop lessons that bring the child to their zone of proximal development and give them the support they need to meet their potential. With the supporting brain research and Vygotsky’s theory, Rose explained that CAST’s work has been focused on developing products that use technology to offer support that alleviates the burden that various disabilities bring in order to get children to their zone of proximal development quickly.

Rose explained four different tasks during the study (reading for the moral of the story, reading for grammar and syntax, observing the style of font, and reading and analyzing semantics) and showed a diagram on where the burning of glucose occurred on the brain for each task. Rose concluded that the brain uses the processors it has, as it needs them. The challenge for teachers is that they are faced with students who, at any given moment in class, may be processing the same piece of text or information in different ways. Students who are dyslexic may be wearing themselves down trying to decipher the words of a story leaving them with little focus or energy (glucose to burn) to process the moral of the story. Rose adds that autistic students are excellent decoders and usually read fabulously, but may not get the moral of a story easily. Theirs is a different disability. These recent major findings in neuro-science strengthen the argument that there are considerable individual differences in how we learn.

Parallel processing is the brain using many processors to recognize an image. Rose summarized that the back part of the brain looks at the image it sees and tries to recognize it; the front part of the brain is making a strategy for investigating carefully, and the affective part of the nervous system looks for things that are important to survival, asking-- Is it scary? How important is this? etc. "In education reform," says Rose, "we act as if kids need to take things out of context in order to make them more simple to understand, but this is not the way the brain operates. The brain operates in parallel, looking for content and context." Rose suggests that by a method of instruction that isolates bits of information, some educators are compromising their student’s capacity to comprehend, making learning more difficult. Learning styles are subject to individual differences that must be considered. When we read, we use all of these processors, at various times, to decipher what we are reading. Different interventions are needed to address reading difficulties for different individuals, and individual differences are larger than we used to think. It is very hard for educators to know what to do with traditional materials in the classroom which are, many times, mass produced--one size fits all. "This is not a good design in an educational environment, because there is great variability here," says Rose.

The technology found in CAST’s software can read individual words and entire passages of a book. This is particularly helpful for those who are dyslexic or for English as a Second Language students. With the support of the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education, whose mission is to focus on appropriate public education of children and youth with disabilities from birth through age 21, CAST developed the eReader software program, a strategic reading tool that supports higher level reading comprehension in students with learning disabilities, visual impairments, reading disabilities, or those who have trouble with language proficiency. The eReader software can take content from the Internet, word processing files, scanned-in text, or typed-in text and combine it with talking and reading software to enhance literacy development. The flexible features of eReader allow the user to: select volume, speed, and pitch of the reading voices; change the default font, style, color, and size of the text; control movement through the text; take notes and receive speech feedback while typing. CAST has developed guidelines for publishers of digital textbooks and created instructional techniques for the use of eReader. CAST is currently working on software to help students who have weak strategies for comprehending what they read, by building strategies directly into the text.

Another product, Wiggleworks a literacy development program for young readers has been developed by CAST in partnership with Scholastic. It is a prepared curriculum that provides a balance of challenge and support to beginning readers through a combination of speech, sounds, graphics, text, and customizable access features. The program can be adjusted to individual needs for recognizing information in different ways. "WiggleWorks is the first technology of its kind that says we can build universal design in a traditional classroom. It’s not meant for special needs kids alone, it’s for all the kids in the classroom. It’s just those with special needs have assistance built in," says Rose. The program builds learning assistance directly into the books stored in the software, providing a more supportive learning environment. A user may choose to have the program read a word, sentence or passage more slowly; change the size of the text as needed; and add a scanning device with a switch that allows users with limited mobility to move through the text and turn pages by, for example, moving their chin. "We can build a mentor right into the book. We can scaffold assistance into the lesson. We can build in evaluation of the program because the program has a microphone for users to test how they have done with their reading." Rose says that this is the beginning of a movement to get more kids into their zone of approximate development. By using technology to level the playing field, educators can reduce the struggle of students with disabilities so they can concentrate, or burn glucose, on learning to read.

Chuck Hitchock, Chief Education Technology Officer and Director of NCAC, CAST explained that the National Center is a cooperative agreement with the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), U.S. Department of Education, in partnership with the Harvard Children’s Initiative/Harvard Law School, Boston College, the Council for Exceptional Children, and the Parent Advocacy Coalition for Educational Rights. NCAC synthesizes existing knowledge about access to the general curriculum, evaluates polices that affect access, and acts as a national leader to disseminate news on activities in this area. The National Center is run by CAST which also coordinates curriculum development for the partnership. CAST’s mission is to expand opportunities for individuals with disabilities through the development of and innovative uses of technology. CAST is in the process of forming a National Consortium on Universal Design for Learning, by gathering a community of educators and other professionals dedicated to developing systemic practice models that better serve the educational needs of all students. The principles of Universal Design for Learning are central to the mission of CAST, NCAC, and the National Consortium.

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