Federal Legislation has raised the expectations for students with disabilities within the general curriculum and assessment systems. Science education faces increased accountability for raising science achievement for a much more diverse population, while increasing the emphasis on learning that integrates higher-order thinking skills with content knowledge. Active science learning requires students to develop and use a number of complex skills including reading, observing, collecting and analyzing information, drawing conclusions and presenting findings. The principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provide the flexibility of representation and the support of multiple means of expression and engagement to address this need. The Center for Applied Special Technologies (CAST) has pioneered the development of technology to differentiate instruction, mainly in literacy, for students with a wide range of abilities and disabilities. The University of Michigan and Education Development Centers are developing and testing comprehensive science curricula for the middle school and high school, respectively. They bring their joint expertise together to create heuristics for universally designed science materials for middle and high school instructional materials; to build an open source UDL Inquiry Science System (ISS) that enables science curricula to be transformed into digitally supported versions that incorporate UDL features; and to use the ISS to produce four UDL exemplars of chemistry and biology units from tested instructional materials and to evaluate the benefits of these exemplars for middle and high school students with and without learning disabilities. These materials support the development of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standards (NIMAS).
In today’s middle and high school science education classes students are required to simultaneously read, observe, collect information, analyze, draw conclusions, and present findings while also integrating higher-order thinking skills with content-area knowledge in authentic problem-solving activities. These tasks are challenging for all students, including those with disabilities. With a highly diverse student population and a mandate for raising science achievement for all students, science educators face a daunting challenge. To meet this challenge CAST, the University of Michigan and the Education Development Center collaborated in a four-year development project (NSF DRL: Award #0730260; 9/15/2007-2/29/2012) to combine the Universal Design for Learning Framework with innovative inquiry science curricular developments to create new digital science curricula that better addressed learner diversity and variability so that all students could succeed in rigorous science inquiry. The collaborative team created the UDL Curriculum Toolkit (http://udl-toolkit.cast.org/home) an online and open source tool that allows researchers and developers to efficiently and effectively create curricula at low cost that are aligned with the research-based framework of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The Toolkit also includes guidelines for curriculum development, and middle- and high-school science exemplars. Curricula that are designed using the UDL framework offer students a range of options for accessing and engaging with learning materials. "Universal" does not mean "one size fits all;" rather, that curricula and materials are designed to accommodate the widest possible range of learner needs, preferences, strengths and weaknesses—providing flexibility of representation and supporting multiple means of expression and engagement. Such powerful digital technologies allow for the systematic differentiation and customization of curricula to address the diversity of learners and teachers. With the freely available UDL Curriculum Toolkit, it is now possible to experimentally test, publish for large-scale use (commercially or as an open education resource) and continuously improve digital, inquiry-based science curricula. Developers can create science curricula that are flexibly designed to meet the challenges of modern science education. Researchers can use the Toolkit to quickly create web-based, UDL learning environments to experimentally test the leading edge of learning design on the Web. As an open-source environment with a built-in Community sharing feature, the developer community is invited to discuss, build-upon, improve and share advancements.
