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Presuming Competence By Design • A Tutorial for Systems, Environment, Curricular, and Materials Design in Learning Systems

Requirements

Universally-Designed Assessments

 

What are you really measuring ... ?

 

Universal design applied to assessment can actually address one of the worst downfalls of poorly constructed assessment - is the instrument or medium you're using actually measuring what you think you're measuring. In research terms, this is called validity.

 

If your assessments measure what they're supposed to, then your tests or projects can be said to be valid. However, there are often hidden instances when we assume the results on a test or project indicate learning when, in fact, they indicate something else entirely - including a bad assessment.

 

Let's explore:

A Click Away

By all visible indicators, Samuel shouldn't have had any problems with the new clickers his instructor was using in his college class. Samuel wasn't blind and didn't have any physical disability the instructor could see. At the beginning of each class, the instructor gave a quick quiz with the clickers, where students entered their answers on a handheld device they all purchased. The device would send their answers to the computer and register them, and the instructor tracked the data over the semester. However, Samuel had difficulty using the device - what the instructor couldn't see was Samuel's learning disability.

When Samuel talked with the instructor about the problem, the instructor told Samuel not to worry. He would just enter a 0 for all of Samuel's quiz scores, but that it shouldn't hurt his grade.

 

The example above is an actual example, with identities of course hidden to protect all parties. In this case, it's very clear the instructor did NOT have a mindset of universal design. When that lack of diversity met assessment, the student was actually penalized. Suddenly, a grade of 0 didn't reflect that Samuel wasn't learning or studying. It reflected that Samuel couldn't use the (inflexible) technology. Thus, a "learning" grade recorded in the gradebook for Samuel was actually a "functionality" score.