Universal Design of Assessment

The concept of universal design began as an architectural and engineering philosophy, but it has spread to education in terms of lesson design and educational measurement. The idea that one should design products and environments to be usable in a meaningful and similar way by all people was popularized by architect Ron Mace, who developed the first U.S. state building accessibility code in North Carolina in the 1970s. The underlying assumption of universal design is that all aspects of our world can be planned from the beginning to allow access and use by everyone. As a coherent philosophy and set of guidelines, universal assessment is only a few decades old. Both classroom teachers and standardized test developers have begun to explore design of assessments that ...