Guide to a More Inclusive School Student Experience Launched

Newly published Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies: Improving Student Outcomes Through Inclusive Practice (Routledge), edited by Professor Linda Graham and Professor Jill Willis, both from the QUT School of Education, stems from  an Australian Research Council-funded project - Improving Outcomes through Accessible Assessment and Inclusive Practices.

It provides an evidence-based, practical guide to enable educators across the education system to improve students’ learning experiences and outcomes and aims to facilitate engagement with students at all levels, including those with common disabilities like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or developmental language disorder.

The new publication is a ‘sister book’ to the popular  Inclusive Education for the 21st Century: Theory, Policy and Practice (Routledge 2023) edited by Professor Graham.

Featuring 15 chapters and multiple resources, Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies: Improving Student Outcomes through Inclusive Practice, the rewards for teachers who implement the accessibility principles developed from this world-leading collaborative include receiving fewer requests for clarification, greater job satisfaction, less time needed for corrective feedback, more time for teaching higher order concepts, and increased cognitive engagement.

“Our book presents strong evidence that proactively designing teaching and assessment with accessibility in mind makes a positive difference for students and teachers,” Professor Graham said.

“Written with a minimum of jargon, the authors of each chapter present evidence from eye-tracking technology, classroom observations, questionnaires, interviews, and summative assessment results to make the case for greater accessibility in teaching and assessment.

“They then use those same methodologies to show what happens when barriers to student learning are removed. And what happens is the best of both worlds: better experiences and better outcomes for everyone.”

Professor Willis said the two core components of the ARC Linkage project - accessible assessment task design and inclusive classroom pedagogies - were both essential for student success.

“If we can make progress in these two key areas, it will enable teachers to better support their students’ learning and allow students to better demonstrate what they have learnt,” Professor Willis said.

“The aim of this new publication is to provide a toolkit to sustain and spread the highly sophisticated practices that do exist in our schools.

“I think the stories from our partner schools about how they spread these gains across the whole school will really resonate and make this an accessibility playbook to drive whole school and system reform.”

Along with Professor Graham and Professor Willis, the QUT authors of Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies: Improving Student Outcomes Through Inclusive Practice are: Dr Julie Arnold; Dr Andrew Gibson; Dr Callula Killingly; Dr Lara Maia-Pike; Dr Haley Tancredi; and Associate Professor Sonia White. Their collaborators on the project are Professor Christopher DeLuca from Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada); Gaenor Dixon, Director, Therapies and Nursing, Queensland Department of Education; and Professor Naomi Sweller from Macquarie University, Sydney.