Samantha G. Daley

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Speaker A Foreign.

Speaker B This is The American Psychological Association's Division 15 podcast series on emerging research in educational psychology. My name is Jeff Green. Thanks for joining us. The American Psychological association has undergone a racial reckoning, realizing that it has engaged in past injustices and harms involving racism, racial discrimination, and denigration of people of color. This reckoning requires rethinking much of the organization's values, actions, and tenets. Shedding light on these issues has also brought greater attention to the way psychology has failed to include and address people with disabilities. There is much to do there also. However, this greater attention has also revealed opportunities. For example, the Universal Design for Learning framework describes how to design instruction in ways that support not only students with disabilities, but also all students. That framework not only has insights for educators working with students with disabilities, but it can also reveal ways educational psychologists can do their research in more inclusive and more effective ways. Overall, there's much to do when it comes to making right what psychology has done wrong, but there's also much to learn when we pay more attention to groups who have been unjustly marginalized. I'm excited to talk about some of those lessons with our guest today. Dr. Samantha Daly goes by. Sami is an associate professor and the Associate Dean for Research at the Warner School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester, trained as a learning disability specialist and then earning a doctorate in human development. Dr. Daly's research focuses on motivation and emotion to inform inclusive learning environments for all learners and healthy development among students with learning disabilities. Her work has been supported by the National Science foundation, including through a Career Award, the Office of Special Education Programs at the United States Department of Education, and various foundations. She is the proud mom of two teenagers and enjoys time in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. Today we're Talking about Sami's 2025 article published in Educational Psychologists, titled Universal Design of Educational Improving Theory and Application by Focusing on Students with Disabilities, which is part of a special issue of Educational Psychologists titled Toward Equity in Educational Psychology Including Students with Disabilities in Research and Theory. Sami, welcome to the podcast and thanks so much for talking with me about your article today.

Speaker A Thanks so much, Jeff. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker B So what inspired you to write an article about Universal Design for Learning and how it could be a useful lens for thinking about how educational psychology can and should include students with disabilities.

Speaker A The editors for the special issue focused on including students with Disabilities in Educational Psychology Theories had reached out asking if I might think about contributing an article related to Universal Design of Theory or how could we make educational psychology theories more attentive to and relevant for and inclusive of students with disabilities? And I decided to kind of anchor in the Universal Design for Learning framework because I think it's a framework that really resonates for people who are familiar with working with students with disabilities and for those for whom that's not a space that they're usually in, which seemed to maybe be helpful in articulating for educational psychologists why we might want to and how we might want to more effectively include students with disabilities.

Speaker B That's great. I'm certainly glad that you wrote this article and touched base with the editors. In the article, you talk about framing the big idea around this inclusive approach to research. And can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?

Speaker A Yeah. So I was hoping that I could convey the idea that if we start from an assumption that students with disabilities are in all of our learning contexts and thus should be included and will be included in all of our educational psychology research, it kind of shifts the attention to say, okay, how are we going to make that happen? What kind of inclusive practices or considerations do we have in our research design and our data collection and things like that, as opposed to kind of starting from an assumption of a normative sample or that we might exclude students with disabilities, which often is what happens when we do educational psychology research that doesn't start from sort of an inclusive foundation.

Speaker B And that's really important. Right. So the idea is that we start from a place of including everyone. Including. And I've read that there's this question about what kind of models we can use to define the population of learners with disabilities. Like, there's biomedical and other models. Like, can you talk to us about those and how that informs the ways we should think about designing research that includes all students?

Speaker A Sure. So there's a set of models of disability. There's many different kind of formulations of what those models might look like. But I think many people kind of describe three primary ones. So one would be a kind of biomedical model where there's a focus on diagnosis and authority figures, identifying individuals as having a particular condition or disability, and the emphasis being on how might we cure or remedy or. Or remediate intervene to address that disability. And that's kind of a traditional view of disability that I think can dominate or has dominated in psychology and obviously in medicine. And then there's what might be called a more functional model of disability, which is a view that says that many disabilities or disabling conditions are caused by the interaction between the person and the environment, such that if we could adjust the environment and provide accommodations, an individual may be able to function in the sort of expected role for that context. And then a third kind of model is the social or sociopolitical model, which says really that disability arises due to aspects of our society that are not designed to be, know, sufficiently inclusive, and that it's the sort of action needed is really to work on the societal limitations and barriers which really, you know, values. Then we can value all diversity, neurodiversity and different, you know, people with disabilities without such a focus on deficit. And so when we're thinking about designing research, you know, often these kinds of assumptions or models are implicit, right. A research team may not be intentionally or even sort of aware of any particular model of disability, But a conversation ahead of time can help to kind of bring forward, okay, wait, how are we thinking about students who may learn differently or who may, you know, have disabilities or be receiving special education services in a school? And what does that mean for our theory or our sort of research design?

Speaker B That's great. And I really appreciate frames that help me think differently about my work and how I go about doing it. It kind of sounded like there was one model that may be preferable, the social political model. But you tell me, I mean, are there different frames for different situations, or should we really focus on our lens on that sociopolitical model?

Speaker A Well, I think the sociopolitical model, you know, most in the sort of disability advocacy space would say is the kind of one that is, you know, leading us more towards a equity and justice focused frame. You know, so in. In that sense, I think many people would kind of recommend starting from that perspective. I will say, I think in some areas of educational psychology, however, there is an emphasis on intervention and remediation. You know, so if, for instance, you're studying how to teach reading or writing or, you know, something of that sort, or you're addressing executive function kind of things, you may end up with a bit of a biomedical frame to start with, because you're trying to think about how. How can we really support these learners to develop the skills that may be posing a challenge? I would say there are kind of variations in, or gradations, maybe in how strongly a team might lean into aspects of biomedical versus sociopolitical. So you may be trying to help students learn to develop skills which feels very kind of cure or remediation focused and might not feel very friendly to a neurodiversity kind of kind of perspective, but you can do that. In a way that still values that all learners are contributing meaningfully and that we want to set up a space that is supportive and without barriers and sort of justice focused, while also helping people to develop their skills. So there may be some kind of blurriness there, but I. I think again, having the conversations and sort of thinking through what aspects of this fitness fit, which models could be really helpful.

Speaker B That does sound helpful. Thank you. That helps me better understand kind of where the lenses could come into play. I know another issue is identifying populations of learners with disabilities. So kind of what are some different ways to approach that?

Speaker A Yeah, so this is an aspect that really I hadn't tried to kind of articulate or lay out before working on this article, but in working with different groups from the disability community and things. And actually I have some doctoral students who have been focused a lot on disability identity, and that's really helped me to learn and think about these kinds of things. And it kind of struck me that we naturally, when we're focused on, especially on school contexts as a site for research, we default to identifying students with disabilities based on kind of the official criteria and categories that are relevant for special education services. Right. So there's federal legislation that dictates how students are identified as having disabilities and being able to receive special education. And so typically, if you're doing research in a school, you will identify those students who receive such services and have a individualized education program or iep. And that's a pretty straightforward way to say, okay, here are the students with disabilities in my sample. But I don't know that that's the only way that we could or should be doing this, because what we've, I think, learned recently, or what has received more attention recently is that those labels may or may not be meaningful to those students. Right. So students may not see the disability label with which they're identified by their school as reflecting themselves as learners. So kind of opening or asking the question of might there be some types of research or some domains where it would make sense to instead work with students by helping them to identify do they see themselves as having a disability? And that might align with the official labels, but it might not. And I think, particularly when we're getting into identity and kind of developmental kinds of processes that could, in some cases, be more useful to the research than the labels themselves.

Speaker B So I really like that. So we can come to this population of learners with certain models in mind, and we need to be thoughtful about what our goals are and which models might serve those goals. But Also, we really need to pay attention to the students themselves and how they're identifying. And when we think about either researching with those students or designing for those students, we need to take that into account. That makes a lot of sense to me. And then that leads us to the Universal Design for Learning framework. And that's a, you know, a big, complicated thing. Lots. It's really useful, but there's a lot to it. I wouldn't expect you to explain the whole thing to our listeners here, but can you give us a sense of kind of what it is and kind of what its big pieces are so that they can understand how you then applied it to research?

Speaker A Sure. So Universal Design for Learning, or udl, as it's often called, originated from the idea of universal design in architecture, where that's a framework or kind of a set of principles that says that rather than designing different experiences or contexts, individual by individual, can we design for udl? It's a learning environment for universal design. It might be a building or a physical environment that has options built in that will make it work or, you know, be appropriate and effective for anyone who's going to be in that space. So from an architectural perspective, people often will give the examples of, for instance, a curb cut on a sidewalk. Right? So that's the. The physical modification that makes it possible to go from street level to sidewalk level or vice vers if you're using a wheelchair. Right. So that's an option built into the environment. It's not put there only, you know, at certain times or for certain people, but it makes the space more inclusive and effective for, you know, many different visitors, let's say. And so from a. If we apply that to a learning context, it. It's sort of saying, rather than taking this curriculum or this activity or this lesson and saying, okay, here's a student who has reading challenges, so we'll make, you know, a particular version that's effective for that student. Here's a student who, you know, is blind, so let's make a different version for that student, and so on. Can we instead think ahead about what dimensions of variability might be present? And can we then, from the start, design a learning experience that's going to have enough options built in that most students are able to engage, learn, thrive in that space? So in this article, I drew on kind of some foundational tenets of udl. These are sometimes explicitly said and sometimes not so much. I took a little bit of liberty in interpreting what UDL rests on and highlighted that, first of all, there's an assumption that human variation is the norm, is to be expected and is going to be present in all learning contexts. Secondly, that when we design for particular populations or people with unique and specific needs, often that benefits many others. And third, that when we design learning environments and we keep focused on particular learning goals, but don't let those goals dictate the means for achieving them, it opens up different opportunities. So I'm happy to expand on any of those, but those all are kind of foundational to the idea of udl, that when we're thinking about designing learning environments that will work for the broadest array of learners, these are kind of key ideas that will inform how to do that.

Speaker B Great. And those tenets are really important. And in the article, I thought you did a great job of illustrating how those tenets can inform research by talking about self determination theory and socio emotional learning research as kind of prime examples. And you know, we don't have time to kind of go through every example you provided, but I thought maybe like one example per tenet might give our listeners a good sense of some of the things that you talked about and inspire them to read your article. So when we think about the expectation of human variation and how that can inform the ways that we do our research, can you apply those ideas to perhaps self determination theory to help us understand how it could manifest and maybe improve the work that we do around self determination theory?

Speaker A Sure, yeah. I'm happy to. So one example that I used in the article is research around physical activity and diet choices, and I highlight a study that focuses on these issues, particularly for adolescents with intellectual disabilities, for which this is a particular area of concern. And what we see is that the findings when applying self determination theory based principles to this issue for this population are somewhat unexpected based on similar research in more general populations. And so we see that when we focus on this particular population, we end up getting insights that lets us broaden the theory and kind of push on where are the limits and kind of how might we enrich our SDT or self determination theory constructs and kind of understanding of the relevant phenomena so that it can be truly universal and kind of capture all of the different variations of populations.

Speaker B So what I really liked about this is you pointed out that self determination theory actually has a foundation in this kind of universal approach. I mean, they actually wanted to kind of describe all learners and explicitly said that. But it feels like what you're bringing through the universal design for learning is a manner or mechanism through which we can ensure that we're Being inclusive of all learners when we think about their motivation.

Speaker A Exactly. Well said. Thanks, Jeff. Sure.

Speaker B So the second tenet from the Universal Design for Learning that you mentioned was about designing for some with benefits for all. And so can you explain to us kind of how you can incorporate that into research on these theories?

Speaker A Sure. So this tenant is really thinking about how we come up with strategies that really meet the needs of particular groups of students, but then often translate into having unexpected benefits for others. So when it comes to conducting research, I think that there are ways that we can use the context of inclusive classrooms, for example, to really move towards expanding how theories can be practically relevant. So one example that I focus on is the idea of kind of the balance between autonomy and structure or scaffolding. And this is one that I think is kind of sometimes underappreciated in terms of complexity, where if we learn from kind of best practices or evidence based practices, particularly for students with learning disabilities, there's a real focus on structure and explicit instruction and really providing the kinds of scaffolds that will help students with learning disabilities to benefit from. In this case, let's say science learning, right. Where processes and procedures are well supported and laid out. And it can seem that that might come into conflict with the idea of autonomy supportive teaching, which, you know, from a self determination theory, but also just sort of generally perspective is really important, especially again in science learning and teaching. And so I think this is a case where when we think about what we've learned from best practices with students with particular needs around executive function and support and having learning disabilities, we can use some of that to inform how do we then help the science learning space in general to become more inclusive? How do we balance kind of these different considerations For a science teacher who's trying to meet the needs of everyone in an inclusive classroom, I think it really opens a lot of questions that are both theoretically relevant and practically relevant because this is, you know, challenging to do in real time.

Speaker B So, you know, I love that. I love the idea of really thinking about how specific populations can inform our understanding of things theory and how to apply it not just for those populations, but for broader sets of populations, be they all students or different groups of students. So that tenet just feels like a really powerful one. Then the third one is about focusing on tight goals, but with flexible means. And so what lessons can we apply from that to the way that we do our research?

Speaker A Right. So this tenet, when we think about this in terms of UDL based instruction, we often think about how do we articulate what the goal of that learning experience is in a way that doesn't specify a particular modality, for instance, or a particular way for students to demonstrate their learning. Right. And so when we apply this to research, I think we can ask questions about what aspects of our design need to remain consistent and where is there room for flexibility that would allow more learners or more participants to take part and to really contribute their data or their insights in ways that might look a little different in terms of data collection, for instance, or might benefit from some kind of accommodation or, or different approach, but really still meets the goals of that design or allows for valid and comparable participation.

Speaker B That seems like a really important lesson to learn. You know, as being someone who trained in a lot of quantitative methods, there's this, there's a sense of like, invariance, you know, in the sense of like you've got to measure the same thing in the same way for all people. And, you know, there's, there's something to be said for that. But if in doing so you're so rigid that you can't include some of the very students or learners that you want to have in the study, well, then that rigidity has become a problem. So I really like this tenant about focusing on tight goals and with flexible means because I think it brings us back to the purpose of what we're doing and putting students first.

Speaker A I would agree. And I think, you know, more recent efforts around what people refer to as CRIP methodologies kind of push this, I think, even further in ways that I think open creative opportunities to say, you know, this has primarily been been done in qualitative research methods, but I think again, sort of leads to interesting and important questions around, you know, for instance, in qualitative methods, when people are designing interviews, they've started to say people can participate either in person or via video or by email or by text based kind of chat with cameras on or cameras off and all of these different kinds of things to really think about. How do we reduce the emphasis on oral language and quick communication and these kinds of things to again, expand who's able to contribute and participate and is helping to develop and refine our understandings. Right. And so how might we kind of learn from that philosophy and that approach and apply it more more often in educational psychology kinds of research?

Speaker B Yeah, I really like that. I'm grateful that's in the article. And it reminds me of something else that you advocated for in the article, which was this idea of disability focused or disability reimaged or Disability inclusive lenses for research. So can you just talk to us about what those terms mean or what they imply?

Speaker A Sure. So I was trying to communicate the idea that sometimes the questions we're asking are specifically focused on disability related questions. And I think those are valuable and, you know, valid in an educational psychology kind of space. Right. So that might be around the psychology of disability or the experience of disability identity or those kinds of things where we're asking disability focused questions that advance the field. It could also be the case that we're doing disability reimaged work, which is trying to say, how are we taking, you know, whatever theory we're working with or whatever kinds of constructs we're trying to understand and considering people with disabilities and kind of a disability studies view within that work. And then the third is disability inclusive work, which is kind of in some ways a sort of baseline level of saying, are we including students with disabilities, learners with disabilities, in our educational psychology research? And, you know, I would suggest that, I think given the fact that these are students who are in our learning contexts and who, you know, are valuable members of our learning communities, that hopefully we can move towards starting from an assumption that all of our research will be disability inclusive and that we're working to intentionally include and report about the inclusion of students with disabilities.

Speaker B Absolutely. And I'm so glad that this article gives researchers some lenses, some frameworks, some tenets that they can use to start doing that disability focused or reimaged or inclusive research, Particularly the latter, the inclusive research. So I'm really grateful that you wrote the article and that it's out there for everyone to read. I encourage our listeners to check it out. And many of our listeners are thinking about writing an article for educational psychologists, and they may have some apprehension. And so I'm wondering if you have any advice or tips that you'd like to share for those listeners who might be thinking about writing an article for the journal?

Speaker A Sure. I'll say that one thing that I found really helpful was bringing my ideas out to different groups kind of early and then also throughout the process. So I was able to work through some of the initial ideas with a doctoral seminar group and then, you know, with colleagues and things, I think putting things together in a way that kind of, you know, fits and is robust. And drawing on the different types of literature that might resonate with this audience was a lot of fun and also quite challenging. And it was helpful to, to have different perspectives giving me some feedback and input along the way.

Speaker B I love that advice. You know, maybe There are people out there that can just kind of think on their own and come up with a whole educational psychologist article. But goodness knows I need to talk to people about it. And you know, the more I talk about the ideas and the more feedback I get, the better it gets. And so I think what you suggested there, whether it's through a seminar or other ways, that's really good advice. And I encourage everyone to do that with just about any article, but certainly one for this particular journal.

Speaker A Agreed.

Speaker B So let's talk a bit about your current scholarship. What are you working on right now?

Speaker A Sure. I have been working a lot on kind of two main areas. One, I've been focused on motivation, particularly in science among secondary students with learning disabilities. So related to, I suppose what we just talked about is use a situated expectancy value theory kind of model and focused on when we think about students with learning disabilities. This is the largest population of students with disabilities in U.S. public schools. And really they continue to be underrepresented in advanced science courses and college majors and careers. And this has been a really persistent challenge. So working with colleagues and students around a set of studies that tries to say with other populations that have been historically marginalized, motivational beliefs have proven to be very important. And does that turn out to be also the case for students with learning disabilities? So we've done some work with middle schoolers, we've used big national data set to look at high school students and so have been kind of working on that area. And then a second kind of related. Well, in my mind, related, although it may not sound so, but area of work is focused on secondary science teachers. And because science is a class that is typically taught in inclusive context where students with learning disabilities are included in the general education classroom, I think it's really important that we attend to and understand how are science teachers thinking about and addressing having students with disabilities and other disabilities in their in their classrooms? Because actually we know relatively little about their understanding of disability or their approach to inclusive teaching. So I'd say those are kind of two related areas that, that I've been working on lately.

Speaker B Very cool. The first definitely sounds like it adheres to the universal design for learning for research kind of framework. And the second one certainly incredibly important to understand how our teachers are working with students with disabilities and thinking about that. So very cool research.

Speaker A Thanks.

Speaker B Well, that seems like a good place to wrap it up for today. I am really pleased our listeners can download and read Sammy's 2025 article in Educational Psychologist entitled, you, Universal Design of Educational Improving Theory and Application by Focusing on Students with Disabilities, which is part of the special issue titled Toward Equity in Educational Psychology, Including Students with Disabilities in Research and Theory. Sami, thanks for writing the article and talking with me about it today.

Speaker A Happy to. Thanks so much for asking, Jeff.

Speaker B Finally, to our listener, if you enjoy this podcast, I encourage you to check out our other episodes on your favorite podcast app and please consider rating and reviewing us. You can also go to our APA Division 15 website where all all of our podcasts are linked in the Publication section. Thanks again for listening.

Samantha G. Daley

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