Equity, Fairness, and Accommodating the Needs of Diverse Learner

Danica, a student with a learning disability (LD), struggles with writing. Her teacher assigns the following class project: research a planet using a minimum of three sources and then write a five-paragraph essay about that planet. Because Danica produces few complete sentences and ideas when given a writing task, her teacher implements several types of support to help her complete the assignment.

The teacher reminds Danica to use TREE (Topic sentence, Reason, Explanation, Ending), a mnemonic device students can use to organize their ideas.

Brody, a 6th-grade student with ADHD, has difficulty organizing his time. His social studies teacher assigns a long-term project that involves researching the history of their town. The assignment includes the following requirements: visit the local library to complete a demographic information sheet, interview three people who have lived in the town since childhood, and create a presentation using that information. Because the teacher knows that Brody has difficulty completing long-term assignments by the due date, she implements several types of support to help him to do so.

The teacher breaks the assignment into smaller pieces or “chunks” the materials (e.g., week 1—visit the local library to complete demographic information sheet; weeks 2 and 3— interview three people who have lived in the town since childhood).

Aliyah, a middle school student with muscular dystrophy, often experiences physical fatigue. She is a highly motivated student and excels academically. Her language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies teachers typically assign homework that requires access to textbooks. Because her teachers realize that carrying heavy textbooks home each night is difficult for Aliyah, they implement several types of support to help her complete her assignments.

The teachers assign a different assignment that does not require the textbooks.

Danica, a student with LD, struggles with organizing ideas and providing supporting details in writing assignments. To assess the class at the end of the unit on the solar system, her science teacher gives an exam consisting of five essay questions.

Danica's knowledge of the solar system is an example of

Brody, a 6th-grade student with ADHD, has difficulty organizing his time. His social studies teacher is giving a chapter test on important battles of World War I and will allow the students 30 minutes to complete it.

An example of an access skill would be

Ahmed, a high school student with an intellectual disability, reads at a 2nd-grade level. The standardized assessment he will take in the spring will require him to read passages and identify key information.

Examples of access skills include (select all that apply)

Rae has difficulty identifying the main point of assessment questions when faced with long word problems. For this reason, any time her teacher uses a gives her a quiz/test using word problems, she highlights the text that represents the question/task (i.e., a visual cue) on Rae’s copy.

This type of accommodation would best be classified as

In addition to having difficulty identifying and remembering important information, Kaeden processes information more slowly than his peers. For this reason, his teacher gives her extended time to take tests. This allows Kaeden to process what the questions are asking and formulate responses.

Cierra, is highly sensitive to noise. The teacher gives her a set of noise-reducing headphones during an assessment to help her focus on her work.

When Rae is assigned to write a research paper, she struggles to organize her main ideas and structure her thoughts. As a result, her papers contain a lot of loosely connected facts arranged in a disorganized manner. The teacher addresses these barriers by providing Rae with a template for writing a research paper.