Universal Design for Learning: A meta-analytic review of 80 abstracts from peer reviewed journals

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework mainly focusing on the concept of variability in learning, providing guidelines for content creation, class teaching and assessment. Previous literature reviews suggest that there is a limited amountof evidence about its effectiveness, and in general about other frameworks based on Universal Design. So an exploratory meta-analysis was performed in order to investigate the trends in the existing amount of research evidence about the testedeffectiveness of UDL. A collection of abstracts was obtained from the ERIC database, from which N=80 peer reviewed journal articles were considered. Abstracts were classified by 5 parameters:a) the presence of explicit results in the text; b) the positiveness of results; c) the category which benefited from the results (students, teachers or both), d) the sample size; e) the country where the study took place. This review allowed to clarify some points: research evidence about the effectiveness of the UDL framework is present in a minority of the retrieved abstracts, but the amount of available information is growing; position and communication papers are more frequent than research reports, which is probably due to the need of guidelines by school personnel; research is mainly going on in the US. The analysis presented here includes a reflection on its own limitations and on how it could be continued.

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