Engagement

Affect represents a crucial element to learning, and learners differ markedly

in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. There are
a variety of sources that can influence individual variation in affect including
neurology, culture, personal relevance, subjectivity, and background
knowledge, along with a variety of other factors. Some learners are highly
engaged by spontaneity and novelty while others are disengaged, even
frightened, by those aspects, preferring strict routine. Some learners might like
to work alone, while others prefer to work with their peers. In reality, there is
not one means of engagement that will be optimal for all learners in all
contexts; providing multiple options for engagement is essential.

Recruiting Interest
Information that is not attended to, that does not engage learners’
cognition, is in fact inaccessible. It is inaccessible both in the moment and in
the future, because relevant information goes unnoticed and unprocessed. As
a result, teachers devote considerable effort to recruiting learner attention and
engagement. But learners differ significantly in what attracts their attention
and engages their interest. Even the same learner will differ over time and
circumstance; their “interests” change as they develop and gain new
knowledge and skills, as their biological environments change, and as they
develop into self-determined adolescents and adults. It is, therefore, important
to have alternative ways to recruit learner interest, ways that reflect the
important inter- and intra-individual differences amongst learners.

Optimize individual choice and autonomy

In an instructional setting, it is often inappropriate to provide choice of the
learning objective itself, but it is often appropriate to offer choices in how that
objective can be reached, in the context for achieving the objective, in the tools
or supports available, and so forth. Offering learners choices can develop self-
determination, pride in accomplishment, and increase the degree to which
they feel connected to their learning. However, it is important to note that
individuals differ in how much and what kind of choices they prefer to have. It
is therefore not enough to simply provide choice. The right kind of choice and
level of independence must be optimized to ensure engagement.

 Provide learners with as much discretion and autonomy as possible by

providing choices in such things as:
o The level of perceived challenge
o The type of rewards or recognition available
o The context or content used for practicing and assessing skills
o The tools used for information gathering or production
o The color, design, or graphics of layouts, etc.
o The sequence or timing for completion of subcomponents of
tasks
 Allow learners to participate in the design of classroom activities and
academic tasks
 Involve learners, where and whenever possible, in setting their own
personal academic and behavioral goals

Optimize relevance, value, and authenticity

Individuals are engaged by information and activities that are relevant and
valuable to their interests and goals. This does not necessarily mean that the
situation has to be equivalent to real life, as fiction can be just as engaging to
learners as non-fiction, but it does have to be relevant and authentic to
learners’ individual goals and the instructional goals. Individuals are rarely
interested in information and activities that have no relevance or value. In an
educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit
interest is to highlight the utility and relevance, of learning and to demonstrate
that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of
course, to assume that all learners will find the same activities or information
equally relevant or valuable to their goals. To recruit all learners equally, it is
critical to provide options that optimize what is relevant, valuable, and
meaningful to the learner.

 Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be:

o Personalized and contextualized to learners’ lives
o Culturally relevant and responsive
o Socially relevant
o Age and ability appropriate
 o Appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender
groups
 Design activities so that learning outcomes are authentic, communicate
to real audiences, and reflect a purpose that is clear to the participants
 Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration and
experimentation
 Invite personal response, evaluation and self-reflection to content and
activities
 Include activities that foster the use of imagination to solve novel and
relevant problems, or make sense of complex ideas in creative ways

Minimize threats and distractions

One of the most important things a teacher can do is to create a safe space for
learners. To do this, teachers need to reduce potential threats and distractions
in the learning environment. When learners have to focus their attention on
having basic needs met or avoiding a negative experience they cannot
concentrate on the learning process. While the physical safety of a learning
environment is of course necessary, subtler types of threats and distractions
must be attended to as well; what is threatening or potentially distracting
depends on learners’ individual needs and background. An English Language
Learner might find language experimentation threatening, while some learners
might find too much sensory stimulation distracting. The optimal instructional
environment offers options that reduce threats and negative distractions for
everyone to create a safe space in which learning can occur.

 Create an accepting and supportive classroom climate

 Vary the level of novelty or risk
o Charts, calendars, schedules, visible timers, cues, etc. that can
increase the predictability of daily activities and transitions
o Creation of class routines
o Alerts and previews that can help learners anticipate and prepare
for changes in activities, schedules, and novel events
o Options that can, in contrast to the above, maximize the
unexpected, surprising, or novel in highly routinized activities
 Vary the level of sensory stimulation
o Variation in the presence of background noise or visual
stimulation, noise buffers, number of features or items presented
at a time
 o Variation in pace of work, length of work sessions, availability of
breaks or time-outs, or timing or sequence of activities
 Vary the social demands required for learning or performance, the
perceived level of support and protection and the requirements for
public display and evaluation
 Involve all participants in whole class discussions

Sustaining Effort & Persistence

Many kinds of learning, particularly the learning of skills and strategies, require
sustained attention and effort. When motivated to do so, many learners can
regulate their attention and affect in order to sustain the effort and
concentration that such learning will require. However, learners differ
considerably in their ability to self-regulate in this way. Their differences
reflect disparities in their initial motivation, their capacity and skills for self-
regulation, their susceptibility to contextual interference, and so forth. A key
instructional goal is to build the individual skills in self-regulation and self-
determination that will equalize such learning opportunities (see Self
Regulation). In the meantime, the external environment must provide options
that can equalize accessibility by supporting learners who differ in initial
motivation, self-regulation skills, etc.

Heighten salience of goals and objectives

Over the course of any sustained project or systematic practice, there are
many sources of interest and engagement that compete for attention and
effort. For some learners, they need support to remember the initial goal or to
maintain a consistent vision of the rewards of reaching that goal. For those
learners, it is important to build in periodic or persistent “reminders” of both
the goal and its value in order for them to sustain effort and concentration in
the face of distracters.

 Prompt or require learners to explicitly formulate or restate goal

 Display the goal in multiple ways
 Encourage division of long-term goals into short-term objectives
 Demonstrate the use of hand-held or computer-based scheduling tools
 Use prompts or scaffolds for visualizing desired outcome
  Engage learners in assessment discussions of what constitutes
excellence and generate relevant examples that connect to their cultural
background and interests

Vary demands and resources to optimize challenge

Learners vary not only in their skills and abilities, but also in the kinds of
challenges that motivate them to do their best work. All learners need to be
challenged, but not always in the same way. In addition to providing
appropriately varied levels and types of demands, learners also need to be
provided with the right kinds of resources necessary for successful completion
of the task. Learners cannot meet a demand without appropriate, and flexible,
resources. Providing a range of demands, and a range of possible resources,
allows all

learners to find challenges that are optimally motivating. Balancing the

resources available to meet the challenge is vital.

 Differentiate the degree of difficulty or complexity within which core

activities can be completed
 Provide alternatives in the permissible tools and scaffolds
 Vary the degrees of freedom for acceptable performance
 Emphasize process, effort, improvement in meeting standards as
alternatives to external evaluation and competition

Foster collaboration and community

In the 21st century, all learners must be able to communicate and collaborate
effectively within a community of learners. This is easier for some than others,
but remains a goal for all learners. The distribution of mentoring through
peers can greatly increase the opportunities for one-on-one support. When
carefully structured, such peer cooperation can significantly increase the
available support for sustained engagement. Flexible rather than fixed
grouping allows better differentiation and multiple roles, as well as providing
opportunities to learn how to work most effectively with others. Options
should be provided in how learners build and utilize these important skills.

 Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and

responsibilities
  Create school-wide programs of positive behavior support with
differentiated objectives and supports
 Provide prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask peers
and/or teachers for help
 Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports
(e.g., peer-tutors)
 Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or
activities
 Create expectations for group work (e.g., rubrics, norms, etc.)

Increase mastery-oriented feedback

Assessment is most productive for sustaining engagement when the feedback
is relevant, constructive, accessible, consequential, and timely. But the type of
feedback is also critical in helping learners to sustain the motivation and effort
essential to learning. Mastery-oriented feedback is the type of feedback that
guides learners toward mastery rather than a fixed notion of performance or
compliance. It also emphasizes the role of effort and practice rather than
“intelligence” or inherent “ability” as an important factor in guiding learners
toward successful long-term habits and learning practices. These distinctions
may be particularly important for learners whose disabilities have been
interpreted, by either themselves or their caregivers, as permanently
constraining and fixed.

 Provide feedback that encourages perseverance, focuses on

development of efficacy and self-awareness, and encourages the use of
specific supports and strategies in the face of challenge
 Provide feedback that emphasizes effort, improvement, and achieving a
standard rather than on relative performance
 Provide feedback that is frequent, timely, and specific
 Provide feedback that is substantive and informative rather than
comparative or competitive
 Provide feedback that models how to incorporate evaluation, including
identifying patterns of errors and wrong answers, into positive strategies
for future success

Self Regulation
While it is important to design the extrinsic environment so that it can support
motivation and engagement (see Recruiting Interest and Sustaining Effort &
Persistence), it is also important to develop learners’ intrinsic abilities to
regulate their own emotions and motivations. The ability to self-regulate—to
strategically modulate one’s emotional reactions or states in order to be
more effective at coping and engaging with the environment—is a critical
aspect of human development. While many individuals develop self-
regulatory skills on their own, either by trial and error or by observing
successful adults, many others have significant difficulties in developing these
skills. Unfortunately some classrooms do not address these skills explicitly,
leaving them as part of the “implicit” curriculum that is often inaccessible or
invisible to many. Those teachers and settings that address self-regulation
explicitly will be most successful in applying the UDL principles through
modeling and prompting in a variety of methods. As in other kinds of
learning, individual differences are more likely than uniformity. A successful
approach requires providing sufficient alternatives to support learners with
very different aptitudes and prior experience to effectively manage their own
engagement and affect.

Promote expectations and beliefs that optimize

motivation
One important aspect of self-regulation is the personal knowledge each
learner has about what he or she finds motivating, be it intrinsic or extrinsic.
To accomplish this, learners need to be able to set personal goals that can be
realistically reached, as well as fostering positive beliefs that their goals can be
met. However, learners also need to be able to deal with frustration and avoid
anxiety when they are in the process of meeting their goals. Multiple options
need to be given to learners to help them stay motivated.

 Provide prompts, reminders, guides, rubrics, checklists that focus on:

o Self-regulatory goals like reducing the frequency of aggressive
outbursts in response to frustration
o Increasing the length of on-task orientation in the face of
distractions
o Elevating the frequency of self-reflection and self-reinforcements
  Provide coaches, mentors, or agents that model the process of setting
personally appropriate goals that take into account both strengths and
weaknesses
 Support activities that encourage self-reflection and identification of
personal goals

Facilitate personal coping skills and strategies

Providing a model of self-regulatory skills is not sufficient for most learners.
They will need sustained apprenticeships that include scaffolding. Reminders,
models, checklists, and so forth can assist learners in choosing and trying an
adaptive strategy for managing and directing their emotional responses to
external events (e.g., strategies for coping with anxiety-producing social
settings or for reducing task-irrelevant distracters) or internal events (e.g.,
strategies for decreasing rumination on depressive or anxiety-producing
ideation). Such scaffolds should provide sufficient alternatives to meet the
challenge of individual differences in the kinds of strategies that might be
successful and the independence with which they can be applied.

Provide differentiated models, scaffolds and feedback for:

 Managing frustration
 Seeking external emotional support
 Developing internal controls and coping skills
 Appropriately handling subject specific phobias and judgments of
“natural” aptitude (e.g., “how can I improve on the areas I am struggling
in?” rather than “I am not good at math”)
 Use real life situations or simulations to demonstrate coping skills

Develop self-assessment and reflection

In order to develop better capacity for self-regulation, learners need to learn to
monitor their emotions and reactivity carefully and accurately. Individuals
differ considerably in their capability and propensity for metacognition, and
some learners will need a great deal of explicit instruction and modeling in
order to learn how to do this successfully. For many learners, merely
recognizing that they are making progress toward greater independence is
highly motivating.  Alternatively, one of the key factors in learners losing
motivation is their inability to recognize their own progress. It is important,
moreover that learners have multiple models and scaffolds of different self-
assessment techniques so that they can identify, and choose, ones that are
optimal.

 Offer devices, aids, or charts to assist individuals in learning to collect,

chart and display data from their own behavior for the purpose of
monitoring changes in those behaviors
 Use activities that include a means by which learners get feedback and
have access to alternative scaffolds (e.g., charts, templates, feedback
displays) that support understanding progress in a manner that is
understandable and timely