The four things you probably tried
July 16
Disability services offices have put real creativity into helping students follow through on accommodations, and they have been generous about sharing what they learned. Four approaches come up again and again. This is a short piece on what those experiments teach us, and on the question they point to. If you have tried any of these, you are in good company.
Four things the field has already tried
1. Reminder cadence
Three or more emails per term, thoughtfully reworded year after year in search of the version students would act on. The honest verdict after years of iteration: very little change. Clearer emails helped the students who were already on their way.
2. New vocabulary
"Request" became "activate" became "attach," in the hope that the right word would unlock the right action. Even with the orientation speech, the emails, the video, and the graphics, many students still weren't sure what to do next.
3. Self-guided orientation modules
Well-built learning-management modules, videos, and quizzes explaining exactly how accommodations work. The candid assessment: mixed success, with modest uptake, and the students who could benefit most were the least likely to opt in.
4. Transition checklists
Clear, thoughtful lists of every step an incoming student needs to take. Students appreciate them, families ask for them, and they are genuinely useful. And still: a list of steps is not the same thing as the steps getting done.
A different lens
All four approaches share one assumption: that students who don't follow through are missing information. Often they know exactly what to do. The hard part is starting.
Why starting is the hard part
Beginning a task with no immediate deadline, holding an intention across weeks, following through window after window: that is executive function. It is a skill set, it is distinct from knowing what the steps are, and it can be supported directly.
Seen through that lens, the four experiments above did not fail. They answered a real question: information was not the bottleneck. That is a genuinely useful finding, and the field produced it together.
The short version
The short version
The field has already run the experiments on clearer information: better emails, better words, better modules, better checklists. Each one helps the students who were already on their way. The next gain lives somewhere else: supporting initiation itself. That is executive function work, and it is what we build for at Lunabeam.
