Design by, with, and for Neurodivergent Learners: Part 7 — Word Cards

By Teon Edwards

Can you make sense of the following?

Instructional content ought to be curated with multimodal delivery—incorporating orthographic scaffolds, sonorous supplements, and lexically attenuated prose—to accommodate heterogeneous cognitive architectures. Employing hierarchical structuration, typographic uniformity, and minimization of extraneous perceptual stimuli can enhance epistemic accessibility for neurodivergent constituencies.

What is wrong with it?

It was written by ChatGPT, with the prompt to rewrite the paragraph below using “big words and obscure terms”.

Educational materials should be designed with multiple formats—such as visual aids, audio options, and simplified text—to support diverse learning styles. Clear structure, consistent layouts, and reduced sensory distractions can help neurodivergent learners better engage with and retain information.

Obviously, the best way to make written material accessible is simply to NOT use “big words and obscure terms”! However, sometimes there are reasons to use specialized terms.

As part of INFACT—Including Neurodiversity in Foundational and Applied Computational Thinking (DOE; EIR-U411C190179)—we created a comprehensive and inclusive set of materials for computational thinking in grades 3–8. “Computational thinking” is, itself, a specialized term:

Word card with text reading “Computational Thinking — A logical approach to problem solving, which can be applied to any problem, task, or system”

And computational thinking involves other specialized terms, such as:

Word card with text reading “computational logic — A way to decide what happens IF something is TRUE or FALSE” and an example showing IF sunny THEN sunglasses.

Word card with text reading “function — A named group of commands that can be reused over and over again” and an example defining the function DRAW_SQUARE as REPEAT 4 times: forward 10 units and turn right 90 degrees.

The INFACT materials don’t require students to memorize these terms, but they are used. So the materials include word cards to serve as scaffolds—a specialized term I use all the time.

Word card with text reading “Scaffolds — Temporary supports to assist learners, especially with parts of a task that might make it harder for them to engage with the intended learning” and an example showing two Word Cards: IF-THEN and REPEAT UNTIL.

We recommend educators use the word cards when introducing or discussing terms. We also recommend educators give them to learners and encourage learners to ask for or access them whenever having the cards might be helpful.

Ensure obfuscatory terminology does not compromise discernment!

 

Coming soon in the Designing by, with, and for Neurodivergent Learners series:

Part 8 — Anatomy of Activities