D566 Task 2 Learner Persona and Learning Plan Example

Studying for Section 608 With ADHD and a Bad Memory of School: A Learner Persona and Evidence-Based Learning Plan for a Composite HVAC Apprentice

Student Name

Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University

D566: Psychology of Learning, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Studying for Section 608 With ADHD and a Bad Memory of School: A Learner Persona and Evidence-Based Learning Plan for a Composite HVAC Apprentice

Introduction

Learning does not happen in a vacuum. Who the learner is, what he believes about himself and what he feels while learning all shape whether new knowledge is acquired, retained and used. This paper presents a persona, a composite adult learner preparing for a federal certification exam, and analyzes how his individual characteristics, the group he learns with, his motivation and his emotions affect his learning. It then proposes a plan built on learning research to promote acquisition, retention and transfer of the knowledge he needs.

Learner Persona: Marcus Bell

Marcus Bell, 34, is a first-year apprentice at a residential heating and air conditioning company in Columbus, Ohio. After twelve years in warehouse work, he joined the company's apprenticeship program in March. To handle refrigerants on the job, he must pass the Environmental Protection Agency's Section 608 certification exam, a proctored multiple-choice test covering refrigerant regulations, safety, leak repair and recovery procedures. His employer wants him certified within four months; until then he can only assist on service calls.

Individual characteristics: Marcus was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder at 10 and took medication through middle school but not since. He learns well with his hands and remembers procedures once he has done them, but he struggles to sit with a manual for more than twenty minutes and loses his place in dense text. He reads at an adult level but slowly when the material is technical.

Emotional history: Marcus left community college after one semester at 19, after failing two courses. He describes tests as the place where he always freezes, and he has told his supervisor he is worried he will not pass.

Motivation: He wants the certification because it raises his pay by $3.50 an hour and lets him work on his own, and he genuinely enjoys troubleshooting systems. He also wants to prove to himself that he can pass a test.

Group context: Marcus studies alongside four other first-year apprentices who meet with a senior technician for a one-hour review each Friday. Two of them are recent high school graduates who are comfortable with online practice tests.

How Marcus's Characteristics Affect His Learning

Attention and working memory. ADHD commonly affects sustained attention and working memory, the limited mental workspace used to hold and manipulate information. Long reading sessions overload that workspace, and when attention drifts, key facts such as refrigerant pressure limits or recovery requirements never reach long-term memory. His strength in procedural memory, remembering how to do something after doing it, is an asset the plan should use.

Emotion. Marcus's history of failing courses has produced strong test anxiety. Anxiety consumes working memory as well, because worry competes with the task for the same limited resources, so the same person can know material in a calm setting and lose access to it under pressure. A plan that ignores his emotions could produce knowledge he cannot use on exam day.

Motivation. Self-determination theory holds that people are most motivated when three psychological needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Marcus's motivation is a mix of external goals, the pay raise and the employer's deadline, and internal interest in troubleshooting. His need for competence is the weakest point, because his past experience tells him he is not good at tests.

Group characteristics. Marcus's study group is a resource and a risk. Relatedness with peers and the senior technician can support him, but if the younger apprentices move quickly through online quizzes, he may compare himself unfavorably and withdraw.

Learning Plan: Acquisition

The plan divides the exam content into the four sections of the test: core regulations, small appliances, high-pressure systems and low-pressure systems. Each study session lasts 20 minutes, the length Marcus can sustain, followed by a five-minute break away from the screen. Content is introduced through a short video or diagram first, then the related page of the manual, which reduces the load of reading dense text cold. Whenever possible, a concept is linked to a task he has already performed on a service call; for example, recovery requirements are learned while recalling the recovery machine he helped operate in April. Tying new knowledge to existing procedural memory gives it more connections and makes it easier to retrieve.

Learning Plan: Retention

Two techniques with strong research support form the core of retention. The first is retrieval practice. In a laboratory study, students who took a test on a passage remembered much more of it a week later than students who spent the same time rereading it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Marcus will end every session by answering ten practice questions from memory, before checking the answers. The second is spacing. Pooling results from hundreds of experiments, Cepeda et al. (2006) showed that spreading study sessions apart beats cramming the identical number of hours into one block when memory is tested later. Each section will be revisited two days, one week and three weeks after it is first studied. A broad review of study techniques rated these two methods as having high utility, while rereading and highlighting, Marcus's old habits, were rated low (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

Learning Plan: Transfer

Certification matters only if Marcus uses the knowledge on the job. Each Friday session will include one real scenario from the week's service calls, and the group will identify which regulations and procedures applied. On calls, the senior technician will ask Marcus to explain the step he is doing and why before he does it. Practicing retrieval in the setting where the knowledge will be used helps it transfer beyond the exam.

Supporting Motivation and Managing Emotion

To build competence, the plan uses small, visible wins: a chart tracking his practice test scores by section, so progress is evident week to week. To support autonomy, Marcus chooses his study times and the order of sections. To support relatedness, he is paired with one apprentice as a study partner rather than competing with the whole group. For test anxiety, he will take a full-length timed practice test in the testing center's format three times before the real exam, and before each he will spend ten minutes writing about his worries, a brief technique that improved exam scores among anxious students in classroom and laboratory studies (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). His supervisor has agreed to tell him that a failed first attempt can simply be retaken, which lowers the stakes he imagines.

Conclusion

Marcus has the ability and the motivation to pass the Section 608 exam, but his attention profile, his history with tests and his place in a faster group could keep that ability from showing. A plan built on short sessions, retrieval practice, spacing, links to hands-on experience and deliberate support for competence and calm matches the learning research to the learner in front of it.

References

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. L. (2011). Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. Science, 331(6014), 211-213. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199427

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68