Individualized Learning

PART 1
Imagine you have inherited a ton of money and will never have to work for income for the rest of your life. Think of something you have wished you could experience or learn or figure out if only you had the time or money or energy. What would you learn, and how would you do it? Is your unique way of approaching learning this thing like other people’s, or is it different?

Apply learning theory terminology and concepts to describe the learning situation.
Identify what you will learn.
Using a learning theory of your choice from any presented in the course, explain your understanding of this topic, concept, or skill so far.
Describe how you will learn your new topic, concept, or skill.
Predict what you should be able to do or understand after your learning experience, using terms from this theory.
Justify which learning theory best supports your personal learning situation.
Explain why this plan works best for you. Is it your personality, experience, knowledge, or something else that makes this the best plan?
Critique this theory: what could it explain well about you and your learning plan and what could it simply not?
PART 2
Select a case from Learning Theories: Case Studies.

Analyze the ability of a theory to explain and predict a case.
Identify what the person in the case was hoping to learn.
Explore whether your approach to learning your topic, concept, or skill from Part 1, above, would work effectively for the person in the selected case to learn their topic, concept, or skill.
Explain any challenges that would be involved for the person from the case study learning this way.
Critique the learning theory you chose in Part 1 for its ability to explain and predict learning for the person.

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CASE STUDY

Dot grew up in a large family in the Midwest. By the time she married Bill after college, she was a “whiz” in the kitchen, particularly with baked goods, and Dot and Bill and their kids enjoyed her skills with home-cooked hearty meals when the children were young.

Dot, her husband, and four children moved from their very small town to a large coastal city and Dot took a full-time job about five years ago. Things got busy over time and their lives became fast-paced. Dot turned to prepared foods for many of their dinners and stocked the pantry with snacks and other easy-to-grab foods for lunches and breakfasts on-the-go. Her spouse and children are all having issues with food sensitivities and Dot has been recently chastised by her physician that something has to change—her weight has ballooned and she is pre-diabetic. She admits she does not seem to have an “off-button” when it comes to sweets and is really distracted by them and will sometimes just eat a couple of boxes of cookies and nothing else during the day.

Dot’s physician suggested she might suffer from sugar addiction and said to stop all processed foods and sugar. Dot is in agreement yet every time she tries to come up with a healthy meal plan she says she can’t think it through and doesn’t follow the plan and they end up ordering pizza instead. She claims the whole thing is exhausting and every time she tries to find out information on the web every nutrition guru contradicts the rest. “I know I have to fix this, but it seems I have to un-learn everything I know and then figure out exactly what I am supposed to eat.”