Multiple Means of Engagement
- Create opportunities for individual choice within your science lessons, ensuring that all options engage students in relevant, rigorous, and meaningful sense-making of the natural and designed worlds.
- Make sure that the learners understand the unit and lesson level driving questions and how their work helps investigate them.
- Develop learning goals that foster collaboration within the classroom and help build community relationships.
- Provide opportunities for and support of student self regulation by creating self monitoring scaffolds that allow students to assess their personal engagement and participation. At the same time, ensure that you are also giving learners performance based feedback that can help them align their self assessment.
1. Student-friendly learning goals: Providing opportunities for student-driven learning starts with clear expectations of learning goals that are written in student-friendly language. One way to do this is to leverage three dimensional performance expectations to create goals that are easy for students to understand. For instance, performance expectations from the NGSS could be presented as “I can argue why certain animals can survive in their habitat using evidence”, rather than “Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all” (e.g., PE: 3.LS4.3).
2. Student choice: Once students are aware of the expectations of the unit, students are then able to make choices about how they will meet their goals. Science activities that provide choice offer students opportunities to make decisions about how they will meet expectations. For instance, educators can provide students with options to explore different organisms within a given habitat, different methods to obtain information on that organisms (e.g., watching a video or reading an article), and support different participations structures that can support their work (e.g., small group, dyads or individual options).
3. Student tools for self-monitoring: Supportive science learning environments provide tools for self monitoring and assessment such as checklists that allow students to determine when they have completed a task or how they will plan next steps. For example, educators can include checklists that articulate the steps needed to meet the goals of the unit, written from students’ perspective: (1) I have selected strong evidence to support my argument about why certain organisms can live in an environment; (2) I can create a visual that describes the evidence I have collected; (3) I can explain my evidence to a partner; and (4) I read my response outloud to check for any errors.
4. Student tools for developing routines: Supporting students’ self-regulation as they investigate phenomena and/or design solutions could be achieved through a "visual task schedule." This tool can help them learn and monitor routines or the steps for completing specific epistemic and behavioral tasks. The schedule can have visual icons and text for each step in the classroom routine or academic task. The student refers to the visual schedule and can check off when he/she has completed the steps in the routine or remove the picture icon from the task schedule
5. Modeling failure and perseverance: It is important to be transparent and demonstrate how scientists and engineers self-monitor their experiences of and self-regulate their responses to challenges that arise during group-work, during the iterative processes of design thinking, and/or planning and implementing investigations.
6. Student authenticity: Educators should neither assume that all learners will find the same activities interesting, nor include learning goals that are disconnected from outcomes relevant to students.
Additional resources
- CAST’s UDL Guidelines offer a set of concrete that can be applied to any learning environment to ensure that all learner can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.
- NSTA publications centered on support students with disabilities in science education
- Additionally, the Goalbook Toolkit features UDL-aligned strategies that help curriculum designers, parents, administrators or teachers remove barriers in instruction so all students can achieve rigorous learning goals.
- Visit the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) website for more ideas on designing laboratory experiences that are accessible to students with learning needs.
- Read Symmetry Magazine article Approaching Disability like a Scientist and the Scientific American article Disabled Researchers are vital to the Strength of Science to learn more about the work that disabled scientists are engaging in.