With the preponderance of federal, state, and local inclusionary initiatives access to today's general education setting is at an all-time high. However, students identified as having intellectual disability (ID) along with individuals with multiple disabilities are least likely in today's schools to spend the majority of their school day in inclusive environments (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Instead, they are often placed in segregated, self-contained settings which by definition removes them from their typically developing peers for a significant majority of the school day.
For the last 10 years, researchers have discussed the promise of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a framework to further extend inclusion in the general education curriculum (Copeland & Cosbey, 2008; Hehir & Katzman, 2012; Jackson, 2005; Jimenez, Graf, & Rose, 2007; Shogren & Wehmeyer, 2014). UDL is a set of principles, guidelines, and checkpoints for curriculum and instruction design and...