Neuropsychologist David
Rose spent years helping kids with learning disabilities participate in
school by creating digital textbooks with pop-up graphics, text to
speech, flexible fonts, and other customizable features to fit
individual needs. The books were so engaging “that traditional books
started to look relatively disabled by comparison,” says Rose,
co-founder and chief education officer of the Center for Applied Special Technology
outside Boston. Not just textbooks. The crew at CAST felt that
traditional lesson plans built around print were leaving too many kids
out, frustrating some students while boring others.
So they flipped their approach. Rather than help individual
students plug back into the classroom, they set out to transform the
classroom itself. They built software and digital tools to pack lessons
with flexibility, offering every student multiple ways to learn and to
express that learning—including print, speech, graphics, music, and
interactive games, among others. They called their new mission
“universal design for learning,” and a movement was born. Spurred by the
rapid advance of computers and broadband Internet in schools, UDL initiatives have sprung up in nearly every state in the last five years.
And now, Rose and his team have concluded that the most
pervasive learning disability in schools, and the No. 1 challenge for
UDL, isn’t physical or cognitive, it’s emotional—turning around kids who
are turned off by school.
“We’ve seen that technology can do a lot of stuff to support students, but the real driver is: Do they actually want
to learn something?” says Rose. “If they do, kids will go through a lot
of barriers to learn it. Creating the conditions that turn on that
drive has become the major function of our work.”
For example, one of Rose’s favorite new CAST projects is called Udio (the name’s a mash of UDL and studio),
an online reading curriculum funded by the Department of Education.
It’s aimed at kids in middle school, the grades where struggling readers
start running into trouble in nearly every subject.
Standard reading supports focus on things like phonics and
building vocabulary with simple sentences. The problem is that
struggling readers aren’t the same as beginning readers. Research shows
that these students feel a palpable sense of dread when asked to read a
passage of text, measured as a physical stress reaction of sweaty palms
and a rapid heart rate. “You realize, oh my God, these kids aren’t even
in the same classroom. They’re in the savanna with hungry lions
prowling, and you’re trying to teach them phonics,” says Rose.
“We’re not saying that intensive interventions for reading
skills, like phonics, decoding, and fluency, aren’t needed,” adds
Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, CAST’s co-president and director of the
Udio project. “But you can’t get traction with those skills unless you
practice. And you have to practice with ardent intent. You have to want
to do it.”
Rather than the usual “see Spot run” fare of remedial
reading, Udio starts by finding kids something they really want to read.
Students choose from tons of online articles donated by Sports Illustrated Kids, NASA, and Yahoo News,
among many others, organized by topic. Some articles simply inform,
such as a story on bat research or a profile of an extreme athlete,
while others cover controversial issues, such as genetically modified
food or doctor-assisted suicide. Every article is presented with
supports that students can use if they need them, including text to
speech that will read the article out loud (the kids wear headphones)
while highlighting each word, and audible, one-click word translations
for English-language learners.
Udio’s other engagement levers are social and interactive.
The program prompts students to display how they felt about each article
by clicking words like annoying, calming, sad, or curious,
and then it shows them what their classmates thought about the same
articles. Students also make Web-based presentations about the topics
that most interest them, using a mix of writing, recorded speech,
images, and design elements to summarize, draw inferences, and make
arguments supported by evidence from the reading. They can visit each
other’s projects to comment and debate, which they eagerly do. Behind
the scenes, Udio tracks every move the kids make, so it can suggest new
articles to students and show teachers what students are reading, how
much time they spend on each article, and what supports they use.
The goal is to change the students’ emotional reaction to
reading from something they have to do, because they’re in school, to
something they want to do, because it’s meaningful to them and could
enrich their lives. Lori DiGisi, a veteran teacher at Fuller Middle
School in Framingham, Massachusetts, who uses Udio with struggling
readers in sixth grade, has seen that happen.
“I can see their confidence when they’re using [Udio],
putting their ideas out there and having me respond and having other
students respond,” she says. “It shows their thinking is valued.”
Six schools, primarily in the Northeast, are hosting Udio
pilots that began with remedial classes in 2013 and moved into a few
mainstream language arts classes in 2014. In September 2015, CAST will
massively expand the pilots to thousands of students and study Udio’s
performance in controlled trials led by researchers at Vanderbilt and
Arizona State universities. (Disclosure: Arizona State is a partner with
Slate and New America in Future Tense.)
Using feedback from students and teachers, CAST has tweaked
Udio several times, notably the assessment feature. The original version
had standard multiple-choice questions after the articles, to test
reading comprehension. But Rose says this backfired.
“These kids have had trouble with tests all through school,” he says. “It made the reading feel more like, Oh, this is something I have to do. The teacher gave me this test that, once again, will show that I couldn’t learn anything.”
The current version dropped the questions in favor of a
puzzle—passages from the text appear with blanks and a choice of key
words students can choose to make the passage whole again.
Rose says that Udio, like all UDL tools, aims to maximize
engagement for all learners, not just those “on the margins.” Indeed,
proponents call UDL “essential for some, good for all,”
much like the related movement for universal design in architecture and
urban planning. Curb cuts and ramps, for instance, while designed for
wheelchairs, are godsends for people pushing baby strollers. Closed
captions on televisions help anybody trying to watch TV while running on
a treadmill or waiting in a busy airport or doctor’s office.
Next week, about 200 educators, academics, and ed-tech
entrepreneurs will gather at the University of Southern Mississippi for a
summit on UDL implementation. Advocates are working to get UDL enshrined in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—formerly known as No Child Left Behind—that’s now being debated in Congress.
Ultimately, Rose says that UDL is only indirectly about
mastering facts or specific skills. Its primary goal is to give kids the
motivation, confidence, and resourcefulness needed to “turn them into
expert learners.”
This story was written for the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.