Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Sustaining Effort and Persistence

 

Universal Design for Learning

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Sustaining Effort and Persistence

The third principle of UDL, "provide multiple means of engagement”, helps promote an inclusive learning environment on many levels.  When developing a course and focusing on this principle, there are three guidelines to follow.  They are:

1.  Recruiting Interest
2. Sustaining Effort and Persistence
3. Self-Regulation

We are now going to take a deeper look.

The second guideline, Sustaining Effort and Persistence, addresses maintaining focus and determination.

Sustained attention and effort are necessary for many types of learning, such as skill acquisition. With sufficient motivation, most learners can control their attention to sustain their concentration and the effort required for learning the task. Learners vary in their ability to self-regulate their attention, with some needing more help than others. Some of the factors accounting for the differentiation in their ability include:

• Initial motivation
• Susceptibility to contextual inference
• Skills for self-regulation
• Capacity for self-regulation

One instructional goal is to empower learners by building skills in self-regulation and self-determination. This will assist all the learners by ensuring each has the necessary skill set. By developing a learning environment that supports learners adversely affected by the factors impeding these needed skills, the environment can minimize these effects.

When doing this, you should strive to meet the following:

• Focus attention on the salience of goals and objectives
• Optimize the challenge by varying demands and resources
• Promote Collaboration and Foster a Community
• Increase mastery-orientated feedback

By promoting an inclusive strategy with multiple ways of motivating learners to persist to a wide variety of learners, your learning environment will be more accommodating and promote student success