Inclusive Learning and Educational Equity 5

Fig. 10.5 The mind map of the tale presented for the co-teacher’s and first grade teacher’s pupils
Fig. 10.6 Co-teachers’ pupils’ answers on how they feel about the school tasks
10 Teaching for Diversity with UDL: Analysing Teacher Competence

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In both years, over half of the pupils answered all the statements in a very posi-
tive way. However, the number of pupils with a very positive attitude towards the 
enjoyable tasks at school reduced during the second grade. When asking if the 
pupils finish the tasks, the number of strongly negative answers increased slightly in 
the second grade. For the question on whether the pupil also does difficult tasks, two 
pupils answered that they do them only sometimes or never, in both year’s surveys. 
Both were pupils with SEN. Otherwise, all the most negative answers on all three 
questions were given by the same SEN pupils in both years. According to the co- 
teachers, these pupils did not have high esteem in regard to schooling. However, we 
may anticipate that their self-esteem is low partly because of inappropriate tasks.
After the UDL lessons, the pupils from grades 1 and 3 (N = 37) answered a sur-
vey through which they assessed their own working during the UDL lessons. For 
assessment, we constructed a questionnaire called ‘This is what I am as a learner’ 
based on the UDL principles (
Appendix 10.1
). Three of the items were interlinked 
to the multiple means of representation, and their results are illustrated in Fig. 
10.7
. 
When analysing, we combined the original five categories into three categories of 
answers of 1 – agree or almost agree, 2 – I don’t know and 3 – fairly disagree or 
disagree.
In Fig. 
10.7
, we can see that pupils’ experiences with the UDL lessons were 
mainly very positive. However, there were also pupils whose experiences of the 
UDL lessons were not so positive. There were three to five pupils who answered that 
they had not learned, had not understood the things to be learned or had experienced 
the lessons as boring. We analysed the connection between the different pupils’ 
answers with the Pearson’s correlation test (Rodgers & Nicewander, 
1988
). We 
found no statistically significant differences between the answers and the pupils’ 
support levels: there were pupils studying in every level of the three-tiered support 
(general, intensified and special support) who answered both positively and 
Fig. 10.7 Co-teachers’ and first grade pupils’ self-assessment of their learning after the 
UDL lessons
S. Lakkala and O. Kyrö-Ämmälä

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negatively (see Table 
10.2
 in 
Appendix 10.2
). Furthermore, there were no statisti-
cally significant differences as to whether a pupil was a first- or third-grader. Instead, 
we found a slight positive correlation between how excited a pupil was and how well 
she/he understood the things to be learned (r = 0.356*, p = 0.033). We assume that 
the positive correlation indicates the relevance of motivation.