Researchers know from neuroimaging studies (like PET Scans and FMRI ) that learning is a complex and multifaceted activity.
Most students with disabilities in higher education have learning, attentional or psychological disabilities. Many of these students have unique learning styles, caused by their neurological differences.
- Students with Learning Disabilities, for example, activate larger and more diverse areas of the brain when they read (Shaywitz et al).
- Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may be using different pathways to process information.
- Students with blindness or visual impairments utilize the visual cortex when they kinesthetically "read" Braille.
PET scans and other advanced imaging techniques enable neuroscientists to study the learning brain in action. These tools generate images of the brain that distinguish highly active regions from those that are less active. The more active a region is, the more glucose it metabolizes--creating a "hot spot" of energy consumption. The greater the activity, the more intense the hot spot, and the more brightly colored its appearance on the PET scan. Patterns of hot spots viewed while an individual is performing different learning tasks generate information about how the brain works as we learn.
Despite all these differences, all learning is integrative. As a result, all students learn better when information is presented in multiple modalities with allowances for the ways they will adapt this information, choosing their own preferred method or methods, and emphasizing usability. As educators, we must be flexible and responsive to all our students in preparing and presenting and evaluating material in the most ubiquitous manner possible. UDL provides the context for doing so.
While we still have much to learn about learning, there are helpful metaphors for what is going on in the brain. Recent neurological findings confirm earlier descriptions of three spatially and functionally distinguishable but interconnected systems in the learning brain:
- Recognition systems know what and where an object is.
- Strategic systems know how to do things.
- Affective systems know which objects and actions are important.
Seen from this perspective, these three brain systems form the foundation for CAST's three principles of Universal Design for Learning:
- Provide Multiple Representations of Information
- Provide Multiple Means of Expression
- Provide Multiple Means of Engagement
Recognition Networks. Most of the posterior (back) half of the brain's cortex is devoted to recognizing patterns. Pattern recognition systems make it possible to identify visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli--to know that a particular stimulus pattern is a book, your dog's bark, the smell of burning leaves. In academic learning, pattern recognition systems are essential for identifying basic patterns such as letters and words, or more complex patterns such as paragraph structure, author's style, or the relationship between a mathematical formula and its graphical representation.
 | Video Clip: Recognition Networks Duration: 0.9 minutes  |
Strategic Networks. The anterior part of the brain (the frontal lobes) comprises the networks responsible for knowing how to do things - holding and moving a pencil, riding a bicycle, speaking, reading a book, planning a trip, writing a narrative. Actions, skills, and plans are highly patterned activities, requiring the strategic brain systems responsible for generating patterns. Strategic systems are critical for all learning tasks, working in tandem with recognition systems to learn to read, compute, write, solve problems, plan and execute compositions and complete projects. Like the posterior brain systems, frontal systems are essential for generating basic patterns such as forming a letter, and complex patterns such as drawing or writing a composition.
| Video Clip: Strategic Networks Duration: 0.7 minutes |
Affective Networks. At the core of the brain (the limbic system) lie the networks responsible for emotion. Neither recognizing nor generating patterns, these networks determine whether the patterns we perceive matter to us and help us decide which actions and strategies to pursue. With the affective systems, we pursue goals, develop preferences, build confidence, persist in the face of difficulty, establish priorities, and care about learning. Recent neurological work shows that the capacity to determine which patterns count is critical to human intelligence and to all learning.
| Video Clip: Affective Networks Duration: 0.5 minutes |
Individual Differences. Learning requires complex interactions of the recognition, strategic, and affective systems, and no two brains function in exactly the same way. While everyone's brain functions take place in roughly the same areas and work together in roughly the same way, PET scans show that each individual has his or her own activity "signature." Each of us has a different functional allocation of cortex. Some people have larger regions devoted to recognizing patterns, generating strategies, or focusing on particular priorities, and these differences seem to be reflected in different configurations of learning style, relative strengths and weaknesses, and varying "kinds" of intelligence (see the work of Howard Gardner, for example).
| Video Clip: Network Differences Duration: 0.8 minutes |
Thinking about individual differences in light of the three brain systems can help us understand the ways in which curriculum must be flexible to reach all learners. Multiple representations of content can adjust to the recognition systems of different learners; multiple options for expression and control can adjust to the strategic and motor systems of different learners; multiple options for engagement can adjust to the affective systems of different learners.
| Video Clip: Teaching Different Students Duration: 1.4 minutes |
