Rethinking Evaluation Within a College Pathology Course

Introduction

This chapter examines the reframing of assessment in a pathology course within a dental hygiene professional program, in a community college situated on the West coast of Canada. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) was used as a framework to shift assessment in this course away from conventional summative practices. The chapter describes, examines, and analyzes a UDL implementation effort which was the result of a rich reflection by an instructor around the inherent limitations of summative assessment in science courses at the college level. The chapter also examines the further impact, on this assessment format, of the online pivot during the first lockdown – and during subsequent efforts to deliver courses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Steele, 2020). The main author was involved in the delivery of the course, while the second author has contributed their expertise on UDL.

While the literature reveals some variations in the definitions of UDL, equity, diversity, and inclusion, the overall philosophy involves significant theoretical commonalities. At the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University, a group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers established seven principles of universal design to provide guidance in the design of products and environments (Burgstahler, 2013). Universal design translates a social model of disability approach to the process of design: inclusion, it argues, should not be about addressing individual differences through retrofitting (Oliver, 2004). Instead, one is to expect diversity, cater to it, and design proactively in order to avoid friction and lack of fit between individual embodiments and the format of environments or experiences. The social model of disability indeed suggests that disability is not an inherent individual characteristic, but instead arises out of an interaction between the individual and their environment (Finkelstein, 2007).

Applied to education, this ethos means that “the use of universal design is effective in enhancing a learner’s ability to acquire, generate and use new knowledge” (Rogers-Shaw, 2018). The notion of the user experience (UX) developed within universal design can be equally applied in the classroom. Instead of being teacher-centric, the design of the learning experience should instead proactively address the needs of diverse learners. This design mindset is essentially what UDL is about; it seeks to inject as much flexibility as possible within all dimensions of teaching and learning in order to be as inclusive as possible for all learners (Rao & Meo, 2016).

UDL advocates have argued there are three essential dimensions of learning: output (the way we provide information to students), input (the way students produce content, contribute and participate), and the affective facet of learning (the way students connect emotionally with the content). UDL will seek to inject as much flexibility as possible within each of these dimensions, by using three design principles: multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement (Meyer, Rose & Gordon, 2014). The benefit for all students is that educational outcomes can improve when the principles of UDL are implemented in course design, learning experiences, teaching practices, learning environments, and student assessments (Al-Azawei, Serenelli, & Lundqvist, 2016).

Over the last few years, post-secondary institutions have increasingly adopted design guidelines and encouraged faculty to incorporate the UDL principles, with varying degrees of success (Oliveira, Munster & Goncalves, 2019). There have been many instances of UDL implementation in the traditional lecture format (Nieminen & Pesonen, 2020), but there is still a paucity of research around the integration of the UDL principles in certain specific fields or teaching environments. There has, for example, not been a significant number of initiatives involving UDL implementation science classroom (Kumar & Wideman, 2014), particularly in professional programs, and this chapter will seek to address this gap.