Universal Design for Learning Strategy Database

Learners differ in the ways that they perceive and make meaning of information. There is not one means of representation that will be optimal for every learner; providing options for representation is essential.

Are you working to support students in:

• Interacting with flexible content that offers multiple modalities and perspectives?
• Communicating through languages that create a shared understanding?
• Constructing meaning and generating new understandings?

To reduce barriers to learning, it is important to ensure that key information is equally perceptible to all learners by: 

1. offering the same information through different modalities (e.g., through vision, hearing, or touch); 
2. offering information in a format that will allow for adjustability by the user (e.g., text that can be enlarged, sounds that can be amplified); 
3. offering a variety of perspectives (e.g., incorporating a range of authors and contributors; including authentic representations of people, cultures, histories, and identities).

Multiple representations not only ensure that information is accessible to learners with particular sensory and perceptual disabilities, but also support access and comprehension for many others. In addition, providing learners with the opportunity to see themselves represented in the curriculum (e.g., "mirrors") as well as experience the perspectives of others (e.g., "windows") allows for stronger, more authentic connections to learning and greater opportunities for meaning making.

Are you working to:

• Use accessible materials with settings that can be adjusted based on needs and preferences?
• Share information in more ways than images and text alone?
• Support students in learning from multiple and varying perspectives?

Inequalities arise when information is presented to all learners through a single form of representation. An important instructional strategy is to ensure that multiple representations are available not only for accessibility, but for clarity, comprehensibility, and creating a shared understanding for all learners.

Are you working to:

• Support students in constructing meaning from words, symbols, and numbers?
• Make sure text and symbols don't get in the way of the learning goal?
• Support learning in unfamiliar or complex languages?
• Honor a wide variety of forms of language?
• Make learning come alive with simulations, graphics, activities, and videos?

Building usable knowledge, knowledge that is accessible for future decision-making, depends not upon merely perceiving information, but upon active skills like making connections, synthesizing information, asking questions, selective attending, integrating new information with prior knowledge, strategic categorization, and active memorization. Research has shown that collaborative environments where students engage in shared inquiry and problem-solving foster deeper understanding and collective knowledge advancement. Intentional design and multiple representations of information can offer the options and scaffolds necessary to ensure all learners have access to knowledge.

Are you working to:

• Build connections to students' prior understandings and experiences?
• Accentuate important information and how it relates to the learning goal?
• Honor multiple and diverse ways of developing understandings of the world?
• Support students in applying learning to new contexts?