Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Why is UDL and Assessment important for higher education?

From cultural and linguistic proficiencies to unbridled enthusiasm for study, to desperate anxiety about the challenges ahead, students vary. Reducing cognitive, linguistic, executive, and affective barriers is of vital importance as students negotiate college and university expectations differently, according to their widely ranging background experiences.

The purpose of assessment in postsecondary courses varies as well. Assessments are often designed to gather student data that will yield information about accountability, student progress, and instruction.

Assessing Variable Learners

Provision of options within the design of both formative and summative assessment helps to ensure that all learners can act on new information and demonstrate what they know. This requires a distribution of the demands and benefits of any one kind of assessment among all students. For example, students with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) may have issues with working memory that would make long multiple choice assessments challenging. If this is the only way students are assessed in a course, students with working memory challenges will have more demands and fewer benefits when it comes to assessment. If writing long responses to text passages is the only option for assessment, students who are not native English speakers will have more demands and fewer benefits, especially if they do not have access to aids such as a glossary or dictionary or if there is time pressure to respond. In sum, greater attention must be paid to issues of learner variability in the design of assessments. Further, consideration needs to be given to embedded design features in digital assessments (such as text-to-speech capability, availability of key word definitions, hints or coaching tips, etc.) so that assessments support students that vary in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, and learning needs.

Construct Relevance

Assessments are designed to measure knowledge, skills, and abilities. Constructs are the knowledge, skills or abilities being measured by an assessment. By their nature, however, most assessments include features that are not relevant to the construct being assessed. Often the methods and materials used in assessments require additional skills and understanding. These are considered to be construct irrelevant. Construct-irrelevant features of assessments may pose barriers for some students, preventing an accurate measurement of the construct.

UDL Tips for Assessment

• Align assessments to learning goals.
• Offer authentic opportunities for assessment.
• Assess engagement as well as content knowledge.
• Include frequent formative assessments.
• Reduce unnecessary barriers to access.
• Support learner variability through flexible assessments.
• Use and share rubrics to clarify expectations.
• Involve learners in assessing the learning progress.
• Reflect on summative assessments for future design.
• Build communities of practice that support reflective design. (CAST, 2020)

Read more about each UDL tip for assessments

Multiple Means of Representation

The first principle of UDL is providing multiple means of representation. How does this relate to assessments? In this case, it relates to how information about an assessment is presented so that learners can have maximum clarity. UDL understands that learners process information in different ways and therefore we need to provide instructions through multiple means, we need to allow for opportunities for clarification, and we need to offer time to allow comprehension to develop (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019).

What are some practical ways this can be realized in the classroom? Think of ways you could provide multiple means of representation with an assessment in your course. Then, click on the tips below to see some ideas.

Multiple Means of Action

Assessments are often limited to a few types in a discipline: for example, essays in humanities courses or lab reports in science courses. This advantages learners who are familiar with, or good at, these types of assessments, and disadvantages others. Multiple means of action means providing learners with a range of ways they can demonstrate their knowledge. By using a range of assessment methods, educators can support all learners.

Think of some ways you could diversify assessment types in a course that you teach. Then, click on the tips below to see some ideas.

Multiple Means of Engagement

The final principle of UDL means paying attention to learner motivation, persistence, and interest in assessments. Engagement can be enhanced by incorporating students’ experiences, knowledge, and ways of knowing into content and assessment. Engagement can be measured by seeking feedback from students and providing opportunities for self and peer assessment. Ensuring engagement also involves assessment and feedback opportunities that are timely for the student learning journey (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019). Finally, it can also mean including student choice in assessment methods. This can be difficult to achieve but will be explored further in the next section.

Think of some ways you could increase learner engagement in assessment in a course you teach. Then, click on the tips below to see some ideas.

Co-constructing Assessments

One of the limitations of UDL is that it primarily sees assessment as something educators do to students instead of something they do with students (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019). Boud and Soler (2016, 402) argue that we need to shift the “notion that assessment is a unilateral act done to students, to assessment that is mutually constructed between learners and assessors/teachers.”

One of the main ways that assessment can become culturally sustaining is for educators to co-create assessment with learners. This model might include approaches such as:

• Peer and self-assessment
• Educators and students co-creating assessment schedules
• Educators and students co-designing assessment criteria
• Students co-developing assessments themselves (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 105).

A partnership approach can help develop cultural sustainability by making room for the experience, backgrounds, identities, and linguistic diversity of both educators and students. This approach can also make space for different ways of knowing, doing, and being (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 105).

Building Assessment Literacy

In order to effectively co-construct assignments, learners need to have assessment literacy. Learners who are assessment literate:

• appreciate how assessment relates to learning
• understand the principles of assessment as well as its criteria and standards
• are skilled in self and peer-assessment
• are familiar with the technical approaches to assessment
• have the skills to select and apply the most appropriate technique for each task (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019).

We should not assume that learners are all familiar with assessment types or the assessment process. This is especially true of learners who may be new to Canada, or new to the Canadian college or university system. To develop assessment literacy, we must work with learners to ensure they are included and supported in the assessment process. A Universal Design for Learning approach to assessment seeks to create expert learners who understand the assessment process. This approach “would involve students negotiating with educators to realise multiple means and methods of evidencing outcomes. Following reflection, there would be a need to modify content, processes and resources where necessary in order to ensure that all learners grasp key knowledge or skills and can evidence this through multiple assessment forms” (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 104).

Think of some ways you could support assessment literacy in a course you teach. Then, click on the tips below to see some ideas.

CSP Approaches to Assessment

How does culture play a role in assessment? In addition to language, when designing assessments, we must consider that the cultural knowledge of learners can impact how assessments are understood and completed. For example, there may be cultural knowledge needed about the content of assessments to complete them successfully. Likewise, cultural expectations around the form of assessments might affect outcomes. For example, while an educator may expect to see a thesis statement at the beginning of an essay, some educational backgrounds may expect papers to be indirect and build up to the main point (Freedman, n.d.).

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy offers ways to make assessments culturally sustaining through both form and content.

Form

The form of assessments includes the type of assessments used, the marking criteria, and the assessment process. Dominant Western knowledge production tends to value individual knowledge over communal, written knowledge over oral, and rational over emotional (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019). Learners who have been educated in this system might be able to intuit the expectations of assessments while those have not may be at a disadvantage. One way to overcome this is to work with learners to co-construct assessment methods. This approach goes beyond multiple means of representation in which educators are still dictating the assessment types.

By exploring “different modes of knowledge production (assessment method), different conceptions of what comprises valuable knowledge (marking criteria) as well as the different processes in which knowledge can be developed (assessment processes), we bring to the fore not just the cultural pluralism of a diverse student-staff cohort, but also open the discussion to further unfamiliar modes of knowledge production” (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 106). This process can help educators create assessments that are inclusive of learners’ cultural knowledge. It can help create assessments that sustain and value different approaches to knowledge production and “encourage critical engagement with the concept of knowledge production itself as a social and cultural construct” (Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 106). 

Content

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy advocates for including content from a broad base of knowledge streams beyond Western ways of thinking about issues. Educators can show respect for linguistically and culturally diverse experiences and backgrounds by including content from those backgrounds in assessments. To take this a step further, educators can offer learners a choice in content or even co-create content with learners. By harnessing the richness of learner diversity “we also enrich the multiple means of engagement advocated through a UDL approach, working to increase student motivation, interest and persistence through facilitating recognition between a diverse student cohort and the curriculum”(Hanesworth, Bracken, & Elkington, 2019, p. 106).

Knowledge Check

Take the quiz below to assess your knowledge of UDL and CSP approaches to assessment.

Apply

1. Identify one assessment in your courses that could benefit from multiple means of action, representation, and engagement.
2. Identify one assessment (it can be the same one you chose for #1) in your courses that would benefit from more diverse form or content.
3. Make a plan for how you will apply UDL and CSP principles to this assessment.

Challenges with Assessments

We know that assessment must align with the course objectives. Typically assessments are constructed to measure knowledge, skills and abilities. The challenge with assessments is that they also contain features that are not related to these constructs. These features of assessments may pose barriers for some students, preventing an accurate measurement of the construct.  It is well documented that most current testing practices in content courses fail to ‘capture’ the actual knowledge of ELLs.  Faculty must distinguish between the language and content knowledge of the learner and determine if one is interfering with the demonstration of the other (Teemant, 2010). The following examples illustrate how language ability may negatively interfere with students’ ability to demonstrate their mastery of certain constructs:

• A student may be able to competently calculate math equations; however, if the student tries to solve a math word problem that requires that same math calculation, he may not be able to solve the problem and demonstrate his mastery of the target skill.
• A student may be able to write a very cohesive and coherent paragraph on a topic that they are familiar with, have extensive content knowledge of, and know sufficient topic specific appropriate vocabulary needed to express their ideas. In contrast, it would be very challenging to write a paragraph on an unfamiliar context, with very limited knowledge of the topic or related vocabulary. If you are evaluating their ability to write a standard paragraph, the topic assigned is important so it does not interfere with the demonstration of the skill (Teemant, 2010).

Many traditional assessment types such as multiple choice, true-false, and short answer/essays favour learners with strong reading comprehension skills, memory capacity and native language ability. These question types may pose barriers to ELLs due to the increased cognitive load and time required to decode information in another language, limitations on comprehension of grammar and vocabulary nuances, and lack of shared cultural references.

Writing Clear and Concise Instructions

In addition to considerations related to UDL and CRP, it is important to carefully craft the language that you use in the instructions for all classroom tasks and assessments.