What is I-MAP?
I-MAP supports student success by supporting faculty to improve clarity, concision, and accessibility in instructional and assessment materials.
Your MSS can review assignments, tests, exams, or project instructions, and provide feedback and suggestions for revision.
The MSS team can help ensure the message is clear and that instructions are easy to understand for all students, not only English as an Additional Language (EAL) students.
Your MSS won’t change content or expectations, but will look at ways to improve the readability and ease of use, which may also include design and accessibility elements, in collaboration with the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) team.
Grounded in Research
Bird & Welford (1995) examined ESL student performance on a set of multiple-choice examination questions. Questions were simplified in several ways, including “change in length, change in words, change in tense or syntax.”
They found that “simplified forms of questions resulted in significant improvements in the performance of the ESL students” (in Jaipal, 2002, p. 20).
Examples of MSS revisions:
Biology:
| Original: Lipids are different than other macromolecules. What are the key differences. Name two types of lipids. | Revised: Name two types of lipids and how they are different from other macromolecules. |
Chemistry:
| Original: Based on their position in the periodic table, which ONE of the sets of three elements listed below, might all the elements be expected to share similar chemical properties? | Revised: Of the following sets of elements below, which group shares similar chemical properties? Consider their position in the periodic table. |
Coding Language Samples to Find Trends
The MSS team is coding language samples from this materials analysis project to look for possible trends across disciplines or within disciplines. This research can provide insight for the development of materials for faculty around language use as it pertains to universal design for learning (UDL) perspectives.
Examples from Excel coding sheet:
| Original question: | Revised question: | Comments on language use/clarity: | Coding: |
| Explain why is water hard to heat compared to other substances? | Why is water harder to heat than other substances? | -If you ask “why,” your student will have to answer “because…”. -If you use EXPLAIN and then “why”, it is redundant for a short answer. -“than” is comparative already, so use of “compare” in addition is also a bit redundant. |
redundancy |
| Proteins are made up of: | Proteins contain: | -Phrasal verbs like “made up of” are more informal and can be confused more easily than one verb. -e.g. made up of vs. made out of, made into, made by, etc. |
word choice/clarity |
Please see the I-MAP Research and Report here:
