 looking at demands and resources and if kids are to be challenged rather than threatened they need to feel they have the resources which I have to say when I'm going around you know to the sessions a lot of your sessions are about resources for teachers if teachers don't have resources then they'll feel threatened by UDL they'll feel threatened by inclusion they'll feel threatened by any of these things if they don't feel they have the resources they need to do it of course they'll feel threatened and that's the idea we need enough resources so they'll feel challenged so they go okay this is hard but I have resources and I could probably do it it's what we need to get and those resources can come in various kinds and I gave a couple examples but in particular one of the groups that I went to was talking about assessment and this is one of the things I left out that I wanted to get back to because it shows the problem of assessment that when assessment is in the same category which is an assessment is this and assessment people think they're measuring knowledge usually sometimes skills more knowledge than skills but they think they're measuring this they don't think they're measuring this they feel that there it's I forget what yours is called the Alberta yeah what do you call it PAT the PAT I heard today so the PAT I'm sure those people say we're not measuring affect that's not what we're doing we're measuring content did the kids learned what we want them to learn did they learn the skills or whatever but I'm telling you for sure they are measuring this they are putting an affective demand on the students and they're measuring it they just aren't aware they're measuring it yet but we will make them aware and so the kids whether they have the resources is do they have the knowledge yes do they have the skills yes do they have the affect of resources and I'll just give you some and these you can look these up these are big studies these are not little crappy studies these are ones that are from science magazine science magazine the journal science which is the top scientific journal in the U.S. and you have to really have good science to get into science and here's what they did they gave they gave students high stakes tests of the kind that you're familiar with and they were interested in how much affect makes a difference so they were interested in particularly minority students like you have minority students here and they want to know how psychological threat remember we've been talking about threat this morning mediates performance in chronically evaluated real-world environments so they're going to look at minority students who feel under threat when they enter this testing situation because they represent a group which is thought to not do well and there's a lot of literature about this the threat that individuals of minorities feel like oh my god I'm not well-designed and my whole culture group is not well-designed for this test we don't do that we don't do well so we expect that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype that is first nation for example a negative stereotype aimed at one's group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat exactly what I talked about we could measure it and say they're under threat more threat we tested whether such psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirmed their sense of personal adequacy or self-integrity now this is the astonishing thing and that's why I wanted to say this is in the most difficult journal to get into the intervention was a brief in-class writing assignment significantly improved the grades of African-American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40% it's an astonishing result now what I want to be clear is that they didn't give them more knowledge didn't give them more skills they just gave them more affective resources to say your what is good about your cultural group write about that before you take the test that's all they did was 15 minutes write about what's good about your background culture get rid of that negative stress of the stereotype that you feel and in a 15-minute intervention scores changes that were 40% of the reduction in the achievement gap it's an astonishing finding and people went no that can't be true it's been replicated again and again so what does that say it says that that test 40% of the variance on that test is actually measuring the threat those kids are feeling that's what it's measuring we are measuring the fact that you don't feel good about yourself and that's 40% of the variance of that test's difference between those kids and other kids huge effect so if anybody says to you in your PAT is it PAT we are not measuring affect you say oh on the contrary you are measuring affect you're just not aware you're measuring it you are measuring it and by the way the people at the big testing companies in the US ETS and so on they are aware they're measuring it now and they're worried about it because people are saying oh it's just a test of affect or at least that's a big thing about it I sorry I didn't highlight this one yet I just want to get this out promoting interest in performance in high school science classes so they were interested in the same kind of thing what would be the way to improve performance of underachieving students in their science classes your first thing you think of is teach them get a good teacher about science teach them more science but in fact what they did was our results demonstrate they did the same kind of thing they worked only on the affect our results demonstrate encouraging students to make connections between science course material and their lives their personal lives promoted both interest and performance for students with low success expectancies they didn't find it made any difference to connect to your personal your personal interest for the high expectancy kids those kids did well in test matter what for the kids who are low achievement low success expectancy they found a big effect for connecting the science to their real lives here the effect of performance was particularly striking because students with low success expectancies improved nearly two-thirds of a letter grade in the relevant condition blog and what they conclude is that in then I just want to say that this is on the guidelines you looked at making things authentic and relevant is a huge effect two-thirds of a grade huge score improvements not teaching science only making it relevant for the low achievement students made the big book so when people say what are you doing about my test scores you should say one of the reasons I'm doing UDL is because I want to improve test scores and I get it that test scores are heavily influenced by affect so I am paying attention to that I am designing in a UDL fashion so that test scores will in fact be better because they'll be less measuring negative affect okay is everybody with me on that so that was great to come up so when people talk to you and say though we got improve those scores we got to teach that hardcore science you say no we need to do all three UDL principles we need to make sure that the test is not inaccurately measuring the students achievement because it's really measuring their negative affect that they're coming in under stress stereotype threat stress stress of it's not related to me at all I don't get why we're doing this those things are decreasing their scores is more like that girls and boys in science and math same kinds of things that they found that they can make huge changes in people's scores on those kinds of tests by changing the affect of part of the measurement