Com220 - Final : Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning – An Adaptive Approach to Education
COM220 – Research Writing
Rebecca Urrutia

Personalized Learning – An Adaptive Approach to Education
Introduction
Some people learn by doing, others by listening and taking instructions. Some people learn and work better in groups, others in a solitary fashion; but not all subjects, classes, and schools teach with this in mind. While creating curriculums based on personality and learning styles would require a major overhaul of the educational system, plans can be developed based on learning styles and personality types of learners to maximize memory retention and learning potential.
Personality
Personality is an important aspect of an individual. It is defined as “the characteristic way that a person thinks, feels, and behaves” (personality, 2007). Everyone thinks, feels, and behaves differently, but as different as people might be, everyone can be grouped into a particular personality type.
Personality Types
By evaluating a learner and discovering their personality type, an instructor has the opportunity to teach more effectively. Some learners are more apt to learning and working in groups, and others by themselves. Using these personality types and studying how they affect an individual’s cognition, we can extrapolate how a person with a particular personality type may be apt to learning.
The Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most widely used personality test used today. It is administered to more than two million people worldwide, year round (Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator [MBTI], 2007). This test evaluates a person’s preferences towards extroversion (E) and introversion (I), sensing (S) and intuiting (N), thinking (T) and feeling (F), and judging (J) and perceiving (P). There are a total of 16 personality types identified by the MBTI determined by the arrangement of the letters which represent the characteristics. For example, “ESTJ would designate a person whose primary attributes...