Federal legislation requires equitable access to education for all students at all levels, including in the postsecondary setting. While there have been a few studies in the chemistry education research literature base focused on how to support students with specific disabilities, this work seems to exist as a separate stream of research without direct impact on curriculum development and the overall community. This study focused on investigating how well three sets of general chemistry curricular materials support variations in students’ abilities, interests, and needs. To accomplish this, we compared the curricular materials with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which describes steps to account for variations in ability among learners during curriculum development. The UDL framework is organized into three guidelines (multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement), further delineated by nine principles and thirty-one finer-grained checkpoints for designing courses. We looked for examples of enactment of the UDL checkpoints in a representative sample of activities. Across all three sets of curricular materials, only four of the thirty-one checkpoints were enacted in at least 75% of the activities, indicating high enactment. On the other hand, eleven of the checkpoints were enacted in less than 25% of the activities, indicating low enactment. Overall, there is much room for improvement in consistently providing support for learner variation within these general chemistry curricular materials. We argue that some of the burden of making curricular materials supportive of all students lies with curriculum developers and provide recommendations for improving support and accessibility.

中文翻译：

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中学化学课程和通用学习设计：计划学习者的能力，需求和兴趣的变化

联邦法律要求所有级别（包括中学后）的所有学生都享有平等的教育机会。尽管化学教育研究文献库中有一些针对如何为特殊残疾学生提供支持的研究，但这项工作似乎是作为单独的研究流而存在的，对课程发展和整个社区没有直接影响。这项研究的重点是调查三套普通化学课程材料如何很好地支持学生能力，兴趣和需求的变化。为此，我们将课程材料与通用学习设计（UDL）框架进行了比较，该框架描述了解决课程开发过程中学习者能力差异的步骤。UDL框架分为三份指南（代表，行动和表达以及参与的多种方式），并由设计课程的九项原则和三十一个细粒度的检查点进一步界定。我们在代表性的活动样本中寻找了实施UDL检查点的示例。在所有三套课程材料中，至少有75％的活动中制定了31个检查站中的四个，表明制定了很高的水平。另一方面，少于25％的活动制定了11个检查站，表明颁布率很低。总体而言，在这些通用化学课程材料中，始终如一地为学习者的变化提供支持还有很大的改进空间。