Study Guide

The focus of this unit is on health risks and benefits associated with food and lifestyle choices. A learning goal would be for students to assess their personal eating habits for the purpose of improving the healthfulness of their diets. This learning goal would be addressed in a high school nutrition class in which there are students from multiple grades.

The rationale for this learning goal is that students need to develop analytical and critical thinking skills about making food choices. By analyzing and understanding their current eating habits and learning about what healthful diets should look like, students can adapt their choices to improve the healthfulness of their diets.

To assess student readiness for this unit, I would lead a discussion with students to get them thinking about their own food choices, asking them questions about topics such as what their favorite foods are, whether they think these foods are healthful, what their goals are for nutrition, and where they go for information on these topics. If students have any misconceptions about healthful foods, this will be evident from the discussion and can be addressed in the activities.

An instructional strategy that would work well for this goal would be guided instruction. I would demonstrate the use of an online tool for monitoring dietary choices. Students will be asked to use the tool independently to collect data on their own individual diets and apply concepts learned in this unit to describe changes they could make to improve their diets. I would ask students to track their food intake using the food tracker on this web site for one week. Entering information on this web site allows calculation on meeting targets for consuming different food groups and whether they are within recommended dietary limits. Students would analyze their results in order to make recommendations on what they could change to improve their diets. I would ask them to turn in a comparison between a typical daily diet they tracked during the week and a daily diet that would meet the USDA U S D A goals for nutrition.

This strategy supports the learning goal by giving students a useful tool and practice in using that tool. Comparing their food choices on a daily basis to USDA U S D A recommendations for a healthy diet helps raise their awareness of what they are eating every day. Evaluating whether they are meeting their own nutritional goals motivates students to look at ways to improve their diets.

To evaluate students' achievement, I would check each student's food tracker to ensure completion. I would use a rubric to evaluate whether the students had analyzed the results of their food tracker accurately and had made appropriate recommendations to improve the healthfulness of their current diet. For example, the rubric would provide a score for completeness of the food tracker log. The rubric would also address whether the student has made sound recommendations based on his or her personal analysis of diet and whether or not the student understood what nutritious foods can be substituted for less nutritious choices in his or her current diet. If students demonstrated weaknesses on any specific element of the rubric, I would evaluate what information was misunderstood or needed to be reinforced and design a follow-up activity to address the identified need.