Cognitive Learning

Cognitive Learning

I have seen technologies and different software applications help students access their prior knowledge and better organize their new information. Microsoft Excel and Inspiration are applications that students in middle school can learn very quickly and then use to organize and analyze their information. I do a Food Labeling Nutrition Project in collaboration with the Home and Careers teacher that uses video, the Internet and Excel. The object of this lesson is for students to learn how to read labels on food products and then to analyze the nutritional value of that food product based on the label. The students choose 5 different foods that they like and bring into class the food labels. They use a form provided by the teacher to fill out information from each of their labels. The information is total calories, fats, carbohydrates, proteins and sodium. The students watch a short video from an online educational site on Nutritional food labels. In class a lesson is taught on what nutrients make up calories and how to analyze the label to see what percentage of fat, proteins and carbohydrates make up the calories. Prior to entering their information into excel the students have a period in the computer lab using an Interactive website to understand the Food Pyramid. The next day the students then come into the computer lab to learn how to enter their data into the spreadsheet. While they do this they can see why excel is used for data entry and calculations. They were previously taught in class that fats, proteins and carbohydrates are in grams on the food labels and must be converted to grams. The students learn how to convert them to calories using a formula in excel. By doing this the students learn how to do simple calculations in excel. After the students have entered their data and have done the calculations to go from grams to calories, they then check their total calories against what the label has for total calories. This helps the students see immediately if they did something wrong in entering or interpreting their data on the nutritional label. The students are then shown where on excel to create graphs from their information that they have entered. They create both a bar chart comparing all their foods and they do individual pie charts. The visual of the graphs reinforce how important the nutritional label is to see what foods are good for you. They incorporate pictures of their foods into the charts. When that part of the project is done, they write a few sentences on each of their products explaining the nutrients of each product why the food may or may not be good for you based on the food pyramid.