UNIVERSAL DESIGN

Assistant is Min Liu.

Universal design is a principle of test design holding that a test should be written to be accessed by the widest possible spectrum of students, including students with disabilities, both physical and cognitive (including learning disabilities). In many cases, universal design is good design because it eliminates confounds with subject-matter achievement (e.g., simplify reading on a math test). But assessment personnel have also found that universal design principles may interfere with testing across the full instructional domain. We need to find out from MSDE if that is a problem locally and to gather the ways MSDE people have found that universal design principles do indeed interfere, with publicly disseminative examples. And my job should also include a review of the literature on Universal Design and write a short paper summarizing it.