Federal legislation requires equitable access to education for all students at all levels, including in the postsecondary setting. While there have been a few studies in the chemistry education research literature base focused on how to support students with specific disabilities, this work seems to exist as a separate stream of research without direct impact on curriculum development and the overall community. This study focused on investigating how well three sets of general chemistry curricular materials support variations in students’ abilities, interests, and needs. To accomplish this, we compared the curricular materials with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which describes steps to account for variations in ability among learners during curriculum development. The UDL framework is organized into three guidelines (multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement), further delineated by nine principles and thirty-one finer-grained checkpoints for designing courses. We looked for examples of enactment of the UDL checkpoints in a representative sample of activities. Across all three sets of curricular materials, only four of the thirty-one checkpoints were enacted in at least 75% of the activities, indicating high enactment. On the other hand, eleven of the checkpoints were enacted in less than 25% of the activities, indicating low enactment. Overall, there is much room for improvement in consistently providing support for learner variation within these general chemistry curricular materials. We argue that some of the burden of making curricular materials supportive of all students lies with curriculum developers and provide recommendations for improving support and accessibility.
Background: Numerous studies in the literature describe the effectiveness of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) in the postsecondary STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) context. Many of these studies are predicated on the assumption that instructors implement the RBIS exactly as is intended by the developers. However, by necessity, instructors modify the RBIS to suit their needs and to best support their students. The purpose of this commentary is to describe a framework (Modification Identification Framework) and method (Revealed Causal Mapping) for classifying modifications instructors make to an RBIS as they implement it in their course and identify the reasons why instructors make these modifications. As the MIF was developed in the healthcare field, we altered and extended it to be suitable for educational settings. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the framework and method through an extended sample study of instructors' modifications to the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-Down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) model in introductory physics. Conclusions: In general, the findings from investigations with the Modification Identification Framework and Revealed Causal Mapping can be used to identify what experiences lead instructors to modify certain aspects of RBIS. These findings can aid curriculum developers in creating supports for instructors so they can make changes in line with the underlying structure and theory of the RBIS.
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