No One Size Fits All

In a one-size-fits-all approach to education, the differences between individuals are ignored or seen as barriers to be overcome. When these differences-sometimes disabilities, but sometimes just different learning styles-are nurtured rather than quashed, they can broaden the pool of potential scientists. A concept called universal design for learning may help educators reach students who aren't being well-served by current instructional methods. Its roots are in education for students with physical or learning disabilities, but it is proving to be good for all students.

“We typically talk about diversity in the context of women and minorities, but we don't typically talk about diversity with respect to learning styles,” says James S. Clovis, a retired chemist from Rohm and Haas who has been involved in science education issues for many years. “Given the need for creativity, it struck me that by ignoring students with different learning styles we were missing a very talented pool of creative thinkers because they couldn't access the materials through which STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] education was being presented.”

For example, students with dyslexia have difficulty with the text-based materials by which course content is most often presented. But dyslexia is often associated with visual thinking and creativity, according to Thomas G. West, a writer and trustee of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., who has investigated the link between dyslexia and creativity.

Universal design isn't a prescribed way of presenting information. Instead, it's an educational philosophy that encourages teachers to make their own methods more inclusive. It's “about how you make sure that learning works for everybody,” says David H. Rose, a lecturer in education at Harvard University and cofounding director and chief research scientist of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a nonprofit organization that develops innovative education tools. “It looks at how we create learning environments in which students who are very diverse can have that diversity responded to rather than ignored. It includes people with disabilities, but it's not meant to be just for them.”

Universal design for learning pays particular attention to three aspects of the educational process, according to Rose: how information is presented, how students demonstrate what they know, and how students' attention is engaged. For example, autistic students will be engaged by different approaches than will children with attention deficit disorder. Students with attention deficit disorder crave novelty, whereas autistic children shy away from it. These differences affect how material should be presented without necessarily affecting the content.

The most important principle of universal design is that no single approach works for all students. Some students learn by reading, some by hearing, some by seeing pictures and models, and still others by doing. Educators, therefore, need to use as many different methods involving as many of the senses as possible to convey information to students to try to capture each of those ways of learning.

At the primary and secondary levels, federal laws such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard portion of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are driving an interest in universal design. NIMAS is a standard for digital textbook files designed to make instructional materials available in various accessible formats such as braille and audio. The standard is scheduled for implementation in 2007. Math and science materials aren't covered by NIMAS, but a company called gh LLC, based in West Lafayette, Ind., is developing a talking mathematics textbook that is NIMAS compliant.

NCLB helps universal design advocates because it requires schools to report test results for different groups of students rather than an overall average. The disaggregation of test results “has put a real premium on paying attention to kids at the margins,” Rose says. “That means you have to think about universal design.”

At the American Chemical Society, efforts in universal design have tended to focus on architecture and room layout rather than curricular materials. “We use many elements of the approach, such as having multiple means of presenting concepts, but we've not adopted the process in total for anything,” says Michael J. Tinnesand, associate director of the ACS Education Division. ACS has published some resource materials about universal design, most notably a chapter in the fourth edition of “Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities.”

Most work with universal design has been done in special education at the primary and secondary levels, but the concept is slowly making its way into science education at the college level. In addition, Steve Rissing, until recently director of the introductory biology program at Ohio State University, has shown that it can work at the large scale. Each year, about 9,000 students-6,500 of whom are nonmajors-go through Ohio State's introductory biology program, which incorporates universal design tenets in its curriculum for nonmajors.

Although Rissing believes that universal design is important, he doesn't think it's all that new. “Many of us use the principles of universal design without realizing it,” he says. “We know that students will be able to demonstrate our learning objectives for them when we give them a variety of ways to learn and to express what they've learned.”

Nevertheless, he believes that the vocabulary of the universal design movement helps codify the process, making it more efficient and more effective. “It captures the kinds of things that many people were already trying to do, but it establishes a vocabulary and a set of expectations and standards that I personally find very useful,” he says.

After learning the language of universal design, the changes in Ohio State's program have been more quantitative than qualitative, Rissing says. He uses more visuals in his classes than he did before, and he emphasizes the laboratory experience, which has become more hands-on. Rissing and his colleagues reevaluated what they require the students to know and how the students demonstrate that knowledge. Instead of exams, the students in the second nonmajors course complete projects such as policy papers or lesson plans for addressing different topics in a high school biology class.

Rissing mentions that other faculty members at Ohio State are making an effort to be more creative. For example, biology professor Susan Fisher has used the arts to help students understand DNA through poetry and a dance performance. The dance was intended to teach the students that the molecules are in constant motion. It's a difficult concept to convey, Rissing says, “and the biology books do a terrible job of getting that point across.”

Rissing has used the nonmajors' class as a “testing ground,” but he intends to take universal design into the introductory courses for majors as well. “Majors courses are always an order of magnitude more difficult to change because so many more faculty care about them,” he says.

Universal design is also being used at smaller scales. Six or seven years ago, faculty at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) in western Massachusetts introduced universal design to their classes as a way to attract more students with disabilities to science, according to Mary A. Moriarty, the school's Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator.

The transition at STCC started slowly, with a core group of six faculty members meeting monthly for the first year. In the second year, they began introducing some of the methods in the classroom. A grant from the Department of Education gave them the funds to work with faculty at eight colleges in the region and to develop a summer institute for faculty at which participants learn about universal design in an environment modeled on the concept.

Dawn A. Tamarkin, a biology faculty member at STCC, is using several tools to expand the ways in which she presents information. For example, she created cutaway clay models of cells so that visually impaired students could “feel” the individual components of cells. She found, however, that the models were effective for a broad range of students.

That's what proponents hope universal design will do: help students, including those without disabilities, who need something extra to access the material; that is, improve education for everyone.