UDL Guidelines - Version 1.0: Introduction

The goal of education is not simply the mastery of knowledge; it is the mastery of learning. Education should help turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who know how to learn, who want to learn, and who, in their own highly individual ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an approach to learning that addresses and redresses the primary barrier to making expert learners of all students: inflexible, one-size-fits-all curricula that raise unintentional barriers to learning. Learners with disabilities are the most vulnerable to such barriers, but many students without disabilities also find that curricula are poorly designed to meet their learning needs.

Diversity is the norm, not the exception, wherever individuals are gathered, including in schools. When curricula are designed to meet the needs of the broad middle to the exclusion of those with different abilities, learning styles, backgrounds, and even preferences, they fail to provide all individuals with fair and equal opportunities to learn.

Universal Design for Learning helps meet the challenges of diversity by recommending the use of flexible instructional materials, techniques, and strategies that empower educators with the tools they need to meet students' diverse needs. A universally designed curriculum is shaped from the outset to meet the needs of the greatest number of users, making costly, time-consuming, and after-the-fact changes to the curriculum unnecessary.

UDL has three primary principles that provide the structure for these Guidelines:

• Principle I: Provide Multiple Means of Representation (the "what" of learning). Students differ in the ways they perceive and comprehend the information presented to them. For example, those with sensory disabilities (e.g., blindness or deafness), learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia), language or cultural differences, and so forth may all require a different means to approach content. Some may simply grasp information better through visual or auditory means than through printed text. In reality, no one type of representation will be optimal for all students, so providing options in representation is essential.
• Principle II: Provide Multiple Means of Expression (the "how" of learning). Students differ in the ways they are able to navigate a learning environment and express what they know. For example, individuals with significant motor disabilities (e.g., cerebral palsy), those who struggle with strategic and organizational abilities (e.g., executive function disorders, ADHD), those who have language barriers, and so forth approach learning tasks very differently and also demonstrate their mastery of tasks differently. Some may be able to express themselves well in writing but not orally, and vice versa. In reality, there is no one means of expression that will be optimal for all students; it is therefore essential to provide various options.
• Principle III: Provide Multiple Means of Engagement (the "why" of learning). Students differ markedly in the ways they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Some students are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty, while others will be disengaged or even frightened by those approaches and prefer a strict routine. In reality, no one means of representation will be optimal for all students, thus, providing multiple options for engagement is essential.

At CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology), we began working nearly 25 years ago to develop ways to help students with disabilities gain access to the general education curriculum. In the early years, we focused on helping individuals adapt or "fix" themselves—that is, to overcome their disabilities in order to learn within the general education curriculum. That work, which commonly focused on assistive technologies, is an important facet of any comprehensive educational plan.

However, we also came to see that this focus on assistive technologies was too narrow. It obscured the critical role of the environment in determining who is or is not considered "disabled." In the 1990s, we shifted our focus to the general curriculum and its limitations, specifically addressing how those limitations contribute to the "disabling" of our students.

This shift led to a simple yet profound realization: the burden of adaptation should first be placed on the curriculum, not on the learner. Because most curricula are not able to be adapted to individual differences, we have come to recognize that our curricula, rather than our students, are "disabled."

In the early 1990s, CAST began to research, develop, and articuate the principles and practices of Universal Design for Learning. The term was inspired by universal design, a concept pioneered by Ron Mace of North Carolina State University in the 1980s. Mace's concept calls for creating built environments and products that are usable by as many people as possible. Of course, since people are not buildings or products, we approached the universal design problem via the learning sciences. The UDL principles therefore go beyond merely focusing on access to the classroom; they focus on access to learning as well.

This work has been carried out in collaboration with many talented and dedicated education researchers, practitioners, and technologists. As the UDL field has grown, so has the demand from stakeholders for Guidelines to help make the application of these principles and practices more concrete.

These UDL Guidelines will help curriculum developers (including teachers, publishers, and others) design flexible curricula that reduce barriers to learning and provide robust learning supports to meet the needs of all learners. They will also help educators evaluate both new and existing curriculum—including instructional goals, materials, methods and assessments.

But first, some clarification of terms and the underlying concepts of UDL may be helpful for understanding these Guidelines. These include:

• What are expert learners?
• What is meant by the term "curriculum"?
• What does it mean to say that curricula are "disabled"?
• How does UDL address and redress curricular disabilities?
• What evidence supports the practices of UDL?
• How are the UDL Guidelines organized and how should they be used?

The pedagogical, neuroscientific, and practical underpinnings of UDL are discussed at greater length in books such as Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age by Rose and Meyer (ASCD, 2002); The Universally Designed Classroom, edited by Rose, Meyer, and Hitchcock (Harvard Education Press, 2005); and A Practical Reader in Universal Design for Learning, edited by Rose and Meyer (Harvard Education Press, 2006).

What are expert learners?

For the purposes of this document, we define expert learners as:

• Strategic, goal-directed learners. They formulate plans for learning; they devise effective strategies and tactics to optimize learning; they organize resources and tools to facilitate learning; they monitor their progress toward mastery; they recognize their own strengths and weaknesses as learners; and they abandon plans and strategies that are ineffective.
• Resourceful, knowledgeable learners. They bring considerable prior knowledge to new learning; they activate that prior knowledge to identify, organize, prioritize, and assimilate new information; they recognize the tools and resources that will help them find, structure, and remember new information; and they know how to transform new information into meaningful, useable knowledge.
• Purposeful, motivated learners. They set goals focused on mastery rather than performance; they know how to set challenging learning goals for themselves and how to sustain the effort and resilience that reaching those goals will require; and they can monitor and regulate emotional reactions that would be impediments or distractions to their successful learning.

What is meant by the term "curriculum"?

In this document, curriculum (or curricula) is defined broadly to include four basic components:

1. Goals. Benchmarks or expectations for teaching and learning, often made explicit in the form of a scope and sequence of skills to be addressed.
2. Methods. Specific instructional methods for the teacher, often described in a teacher's edition of a textbook.
3. Materials. Media and tools that are used for teaching and learning.
4. Assessment. Reasons for and methods of measuring student progress.

The term curriculum is often used to describe only goals, objectives, or plans, which are distinct from the means—the methods, materials, and assessments. Yet because each of these components is essential for effective learning, and because each includes hidden barriers that undermine students’ efforts to become master learners, curriculum design should consider each of them as a piece.

These Guidelines apply to the general education curriculum, which, when universally designed, should meet the educational needs of most students, including those with disabilities. This document can help guide the design of expectations, content, methods, and outcomes across differing classrooms in each school or system.

What does it mean to say curricula are "disabled"?

General education curricula are often disabled in the following ways:

1. They are disabled in WHO they can teach. Curricula are often not conceived, designed, or validated for use with the diverse population of students actually found in our classrooms. Students who are "in the margins"—those with special needs or disabilities, those who are "gifted and talented," those who are English-language learners, etc.—often bear the brunt of a curriculum designed for the happy medium.
2. They are disabled in WHAT they can teach. Curricula are often designed to deliver information, or content, without considering the development of learning strategies—the skills students need to comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and transform information into usable knowledge. Mainstream curricula are largely constructed around print-based media, which are good at delivering narrative and expository content such as literature or history to students who are facile with print, but they are not ideal for domains like math, science, and language that require an understanding of dynamic processes and relationships, computations, or procedures.
3. They are disabled in HOW they can teach. Curricula often provide a few limited instructional options or modalities. They typically are not only ill-equipped to differentiate instruction for differing students, or even for the same student at different levels of mastery, they also are handicapped by their inability to provide many of the key elements of evidence-based pedagogy: the ability to highlight critical features or big ideas, the ability to provide relevant background knowledge as needed, the ability to actively model successful skills and strategies, the ability to monitor progress dynamically, the ability to offer graduated scaffolding, and so forth. Today’s typical curriculum is much better designed to present information than to teach.

How does UDL address and redress curricular disabilities?

The usual process for making curricula more accessible is to adapt existing curricula—especially the instructional materials and methods—to make them more accessible for students. Teachers frequently are forced to make heroic attempts on their own to adapt curricular elements that were not designed to meet the learning needs of diverse students. The term "universal design" is often mistakenly applied to such after-the-fact adaptations.

However, UDL refers to a process by which a curriculum (i.e., goals, methods, materials, and assessments) is intentionally and systematically designed from the beginning to address individual differences. With curricula that are universally designed from the start, much of the difficulty of "retrofitting" and adapting them can be reduced or eliminated, and a more effective learning environment for all students can be implemented.

The challenge of accommodating diverse needs is not merely to differentiate the curriculum but to do so effectively. To do that, UDL focuses on identifying practices that have proven effective not just for the "average" student, if such a student exists, but for students who are distinctly "not average": students with disabilities, English-language learners, students who have endured suboptimal instruction in the past, students who are "gifted and talented," students who are otherwise "in the margins." Considerable research already exists that identifies evidence-based optimal practices for students presently in the margins. Unfortunately, these best practices have been available only sporadically, typically only after a student has already failed in the mainstream curriculum. The best practices are then provided in separate remedial or special placements, where ties to the mainstream curriculum and its high standards have been severed entirely. A UDL curriculum provides the means to repair those severed ties.

While the best educators have found ways to differentiate a curriculum for thousands of years, the field of UDL has benefited greatly from the recent advent of powerful digital technologies that make it possible to customize or personalize curriculum for diverse students more easily and effectively. Advances in technology and the learning sciences have made such "on-the-fly" individualization of curricula possible in practical, cost-effective ways. Furthermore, learning and demonstrating effective uses of new media is itself an important instructional outcome.

New media dominate our culture in the workforce, in communications, and in entertainment. Therefore, every student now in school needs a much higher level of literacy than ever before—a literacy that is much broader and more inclusive of the media of our culture. Consequently, the UDL Guidelines make frequent references to technology options for implementing UDL.

What evidence supports the practices of Universal Design for Learning?

UDL is based on the most widely replicated finding in educational research: students are highly variable in their response to instruction. In virtually every research report on instruction or intervention, individual differences are not merely evident but prominent in the results. Rather than treat these individual differences as irrelevant (or even annoying) sources of error variance, UDL treats them as main effects—in other words, they are fundamental to understanding and designing effective instruction. In order to meet the challenge of high standards, the UDL approach eschews one-size-fits-all curricula in favor of flexible designs that have customizable options to meet individual students’ needs. Such options are varied and robust enough to optimize instruction for diverse learners—the learners found in every classroom.

The research that supports UDL comes from three categories. First, there is the research basis for the general principles of UDL. The three basic principles are derived from modern neuroscience and the cognitive science of learning, but they also are deeply rooted in the foundational work of Lev Vygotsky and Benjamin Bloom, who espoused nearly identical principles for understanding individual differences and the pedagogies required to address them. For example, Vygotsky emphasized what is also a key point of a UDL curriculum—the idea that supports or "scaffolds" are not permanent but rather are gradually removed as an individual becomes an expert learner, the way training wheels are unnecessary once a person has successfully mastered riding a bike.

Second, there is the research identifying the specific practices that are critical to meeting the challenge of individual differences—research that has been amassed over decades by many different researchers in many different universities and laboratories.

Third, there is the research on the specific applications of UDL. This new area of research is in its early stages, but it will take a more prominent place as full-scale curricular applications and system-wide implementation are developed. Because the research these UDL Guidelines are based on would extend this summary unmanageably, we will provide the research associated with each Guideline in a separate document on this website.

How are the Guidelines organized and how should they be used?

The UDL Guidelines are organized according to the three main principles of UDL, which address representation, expression, and engagement. For each of these areas, specific "Checkpoints" for options are highlighted, followed by examples of practical suggestions.

Like UDL itself, these Guidelines are flexible and should be mixed and matched in the curriculum as appropriate. The UDL Guidelines are not meant to be a “prescription” but a set of strategies that can be employed to overcome the barriers inherent in most existing curricula. They may serve as the basis for building in the options and the flexibility that are necessary to maximize learning opportunities for all students. Educators may find that they are already incorporating many of these Guidelines into their practice.

The Guidelines presented here are an outline or précis of what will eventually emerge. While the UDL Guidelines will eventually address the whole curriculum in depth, this first effort focuses primarily on two curricular components: instructional methods and materials. Instructional goals and assessment, which do not receive equal consideration in this initial edition, will be the main focus of later versions.

These Guidelines are labeled Version1.0 because we expect that as others contribute suggestions, we will be able to revise and vastly improve them in future versions. Our intention is to collect and synthesize comments from the field, weigh it against the latest research evidence, and, in consultation with an editorial advisory board, make appropriate changes, additions, and updates to the UDL Guidelines on a regular basis. This is just a beginning, but we hope it will help our readers improve their curricula so that all individuals can become expert learners.