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 amount of 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 test? ed effectiveness 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 pa? rameters: a) the presence of explicit results in the text; b) the positiveness of re? sults; 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 effective? ness of the UDL framework is present in a minority of the retrieved abstracts, but the amount of available information is growing; position and communication pa? pers 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.