Options for Recruiting Interest

 

• Provide learners with as much discretion and autonomy as possible by providing choices in the level of challenge, type of tools used, color, design, and layout of graphics, and sequence or timing of tasks.
• Involve learners, where and whenever possible, in setting their own personal academic and behavioral goals.
• Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be personalized and contextualized to learners’ lives, culturally relevant and responsive, appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender groups.
• Design activities so that outcomes are authentic, communication to real audiences, and are purposeful.
• Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration, and experimentation. Invite personal response, evaluation, and self-reflection to content and activities.

Options for Sustaining Effort & Persistence

 

• Use prompts or requirements to explicitly formulate or restate goals.
• Use hand-held or computer-based scheduling tools with reminders.
• Provide opportunities for collaboration, peer tutoring and support.
• Vary the degree of freedom for acceptable performance.
• Emphasize process, effort, improvement in meeting standards as alternative to external evaluation, performance goals, competition.
• Use cooperative learning groups with scaffolded roles and responsibilities.
• Prompt learners on when and how to ask peers and or teachers for help.
• Construct virtual communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities.
• Differentiate the degree of difficulty or complexity within which core activities can be completed.

Options for Self-regulation

 

• Use prompts, reminders, guides, rubrics, and checklists that focus on self-regulatory goals.
• Use differentiated models, scaffolds and feedback for managing frustration, seeking external motional support, and developing internal controls and coping skills.
• Provide recording devices, aids, or charts to assist individuals in learning to collect, chart and display data from their own behavior (including emotional responses, effect, etc.) to monitor changes in those behaviors.
• Design activities in which learners get feedback and have access to alternative scaffolds (charts, templates, feedback displays) that support them in monitoring their progress in an understandable and timely manner.

Options for Perception

 

• Use text equivalents in the form of captions or automated speech-to-text (voice recognition) for spoken language.
• Provide visual diagrams, charts, notations of music or sound.
• Provide written transcripts for videos or auditory clips.
• Vary the display of information in a flexible format including: the size of text, images, graphs, tables, or other visual content.
• Vary the contrast between background and text or image.
• Vary the color used for information on emphasis.
• Vary the volume or rate of speech or sound.
• Vary the speed or timing of video, animation, sound, simulations, etc.
• Vary the font used for print.

Options for Language and Symbols

 

• Pre-teach vocabulary and symbols, especially in ways that promote connection to the learners’ experience and prior knowledge.
• Highlight how complex terms, expressions, or equations are composed of simpler words or symbols.
• Clarify unfamiliar syntax (in language or in math formulas) or underlying structure (in diagrams, graphs, illustrations, extended expositions, or narratives).
• Support deciding of text, mathematical notation, and symbols.
• Present key concepts in one form of symbolic representation (e.g. an expository text or a math equation) with an alternative form (e.g. an illustration, dance/movement, diagram, table, model, video, comic strip, storyboard, photograph, animation, physical or virtual manipulative).

Options for Comprehension

 

• Activate prior knowledge (e.g. Using visual imagery, concept anchoring, or concept mastery routines), using advance organizers (e.g. KWL methods, concept maps), and pre-teaching critical prerequisite concepts through demonstration or models, concrete objects.
• Bridge concepts with relevant analogies and metaphors.
• Highlight patterns, critical features, big ideas and relationships.
• Emphasize key elements in text, graphics, diagrams, formulas.
• Use cues and prompts to draw attention to critical features, explicit prompts for each step in a sequential process.
• “Chunk” information into smaller elements.
• Use checklists, organizers, sticky notes, electronic reminders, and mnemonic strategies.
• Schedule explicit opportunities for spaced review and practice.

Options for Physical Action

 

• Provide alternatives in the requirements for rate, timing, amplitude, and range of motor action necessary to interact with instructional materials, physical manipulatives, and technologies.
• Provide alternatives for physically responding or indicating selections (e.g. to marking with pen and pencil, to mouse control).
• Provide alternatives for physically interacting with materials (e.g. by hand, voice, switch, joystick, keyboard, or adapted keyboard).
• Use keyboard commands for mouse actions.
• Consider switch options, alternative keyboards, and customized overlays for touch screens and keyboards.

 

Options for Expressive Skills & Fluency

 

• Compose in multiple media such as text, speech, drawing, illustration, comics, storyboards, design, film, music, visual art, sculpture, or video.
• Provide learnings with spell checkers, grammar checkers, word prediction software, speech-to-text software, human dictation, and recording.
• Provide calculators, graphing calculators, geometric sketchpads, pre-formatted graph paper.
• Use sentence starters, sentence strips, story webs, outlining tools, concept mapping tools, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and music notation (writing) software.
• Provide base-10 blocks, algebra blocks (either concrete or virtual).
• Use web applications (e.g. wikis, animation, presentation).
• Provide scaffolds that can be gradually released while increasing independence and skills.

Options for Executive Functions

 

• Use prompts and scaffolds to estimate effort, resources, and difficulty; and models or examples of the process and product of goal-setting.
• Provide learners with guides and checklists for scaffolding goal-setting.
• Use prompts that embed “stop & think” before acting, coaches or mentors that model think-alouds of the process; and prompts for categorizing and systematizing.
• Use checklists and project planning templates for setting up prioritization sequences, and schedules of steps.
• Break long-term goals into reachable short-term objectives.
• Use checklists and guides for note-taking, and guided questions for self-monitoring.