Adult Learning
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Presentation at the 2014 UNC School of Government Teaching Palooza, answering questions such as 'Who are adult learners?', 'How does adult learning differ from other developmental stages (i.e. childhood, adolescence)?', 'What is the best to teach adult learners'?
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Adult Learning
- 1. Who are these people? Teaching ‘Our’ Adult Learners Stefanie Panke Teaching Palooza 2014 UNC School of Government
- 2. ‘Our’ Adult Learners: Facts, Findings, Frameworks You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?!
- 5. Adult Skills Survey CNS News The New York Times MSNBC News CNN
- 6. Adult Learners • Who is an adult learner? • How does adult learning differ? • What instructional frameworks exist for adult leaning?
- 8. Who is an adult learner?
- 9. Who is an adult learner? 18 25 ? 16 ? ? ?
- 10. You, Me, Everybody • Formal or informal learning activities • After a break since initial education • New knowledge and skills
- 11. How does adult learning differ?
- 12. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 13. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 14. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 15. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 16. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 17. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 18. How does learning work? • Neurological – What happens in the brain? • Cognitive – What happens in the mind? • Metacognitive – How does the mind monitor what happens in the mind? • Social –What happens in the environment?
- 19. How the mind works
- 20. How the mind works
- 21. How the mind works
- 22. How the mind works 4±1
- 23. How the mind works
- 24. How the mind works
- 25. How the mind changes
- 26. How the mind changes
- 27. How adults approach learning Learning Strategies Selectivity Knowledge Metacognition
- 28. How adults approach learning Learning Strategies Selectivity Knowledge Metacognition
- 29. How can we use this in teaching? Andragogy Pedagogy
- 30. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 31. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 32. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 33. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 34. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 35. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Readiness 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 36. Knowles’ 6 Principles 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Directedness 4. Timing 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Intrinsic Motivation
- 37. How am I doing so far? 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Direction 4. Readiness 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Internal Motivation
- 38. How am I doing so far? 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Direction 4. Readiness 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Internal Motivation
- 39. How am I doing so far? 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Direction 4. Readiness 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Internal Motivation
- 40. How am I doing so far? 1. Relevance 2. Life Experience 3. Self-Direction 4. Readiness 5. Problem-Orientation 6. Internal Motivation
- 41. Complete the sentence To be effective in teaching my clients, I have to understand that….
- 42. What about you? To be effective in teaching my clients, I have to understand that ….
Editor's Notes
- When I prepared this presentation, this saying” You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” kept popping into my head because I depicts a typical preconception that I and many other people implicitly share: Learning is best done young. For instance, the younger you learn a language, the better your chances of success. But is that actually true?
- When I was a child in school, our teachers and parents kept telling us: You do not learn for School, you learn for life. And that sounds like there is a finish line to learning that you cross when you leave School and what you have learned until then will carry you through life.
- This perspective has certainly changed. We no longer learn for life but prepare for a life full of learning. How to effectively support learning in adulthood is not only important for us here at the School of Government. It is being recognized as a challenge on the national and international level.
- In 2013, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a comprehensive, international survey on adult skills. Based on data from 166.000 people from 23 countries, the survey assessed the proficiency of adults learners in literacy, numeracy and problem solving with information technologies. The U.S. overall fairly low ranking meant that for a little while made adult learning a hot topic in the press and certainly raised attention for what has long been the red-headed stepchild of education. So this is a perfect time to be working in an adult learning institution and to think about how to effectively deliver adult learning.
- In preparing this session I have tried to capture the answer to three questions 1. ‘Who is an adult learner? 2. What distinguishes adult learning and adult education from other areas of education? And finally, 3. what instructional strategies can we use to enhance and encourage learning in adulthood? In the handout you find many useful resources, articles, books, datasets and websites to further explore the topic.
- One resource whom I want to mention is Vaughn, who actually has a PhD in Adult Education from NC State, but she chose to go to the beach instead…. So you are stuck with me.
- So let’s live the Canadian dream and get smarter about adult learner. Well the first obvious question one may have about the so called ‘adult learner’ is a definition. “Who is an adult learner?” Are these learners who have a grown-up job, who are legally allowed to drink, who already have completed an education or achieved mastery in a domain?
- If you ask Google, you get two different answers that are frequently repeated over the Internet. One from the American Council on Education ‘Adult learners are typically defined as learners over the age of 25; the other from Wikipedia ‘a person 18 years and up who is involved in forms of learning’. The OECD survey of adult skills included people from 16 to 65.
- Well, I am European, so if we look for standardization, I turn to the European Commission. It turns out that the EU does not only standardize the curvature of bananas (by the way this is regulation no. 2257/94), but also provides a really useful definition of adult learners. ‘people who undertake formal or informal learning activities after a break since leaving initial education and training to acquire new knowledge and skills’. If you think of all the people who acquire new knowledge and skills after their initial education and training, it becomes pretty clear that adult learners are a highly diverse group. One might say, they are not a group at all, adult learning is simply a fact of life. Any and all of us here in this room are adult learners and we all differ in our working and learning styles. So one important lesson is to forego “generic”, stereotypical descriptions of adult learners. There is no easy answer to “Who are these people”. Instead we have to realize that the adult education classroom will most likely present us with a diversity of learning needs and styles.
- However, the question remains, are there aspects of adult learning that we can generalize? When I think about how our learning differs from our children, nieces and nephews on the one hand and our parents on the other hand, it seems highly intuitive that learning preferences and processes change over the individual life span and also differ between generations and age groups. Do adults learn different from children? How does learning change over the lifespan?
- The way we think about how learning changes over the lifespan depends on how we answer the question how learning works in general. And the answer to this question depends on what we are interested in studying. There are at least four different perspectives on learning.
- If you are looking at learning from a neurological perspective as it is typical for psychiatrist or biologist, you will describe learning as a brain function that has evolved as an evolutionary survival mechanism. Learning processes will be studied for instance using MRI images to understand how different areas of the brain are used. You observe learning on the physical level of watching neurons firing.
- If you are an educational psychologist, you will focus less on the hardware, or wetware, that is, the brain, and instead look at the operating system that runs on it, that is the mind. You will talk about learning in terms of working memory, information chunks, schema acquisition, capacity and cognitive load.
- Lately, educational psychologists have also started to look at the processes that the mind performs to support learning such as volition, motivation and self-regulation.
- If you are social constructivist, you understand learning as a situated process and study the socially and technologically mediated activities associated with it. You study the learner in their natural environment and try to observe what happens between people in a learning situation.
- One thing that is repeated throughout the literature is that adult learners like having choices and control their learning. And if I were a better teacher, more spontaneous and more adapt in using clickers, this would be a great time to let you all choose an area we should focus on.
- .
- Basically, we understand how the mind works in similar ways as a computer works – we have the disk space where we save information and the random access memory where we process information.
- The working memory is the place where we keep bits of information accessible and where we perform cognitive operations. This is where we mull things over, where we manipulate or transform information.
- The long term memory is our hard drive – it is where we store information long term. Learning is the process of adding new information to our long term memory. There are two factors that are decisive for this to happen are attention and elaboration. If we want to make sure to remember something, we first of all need to pay attention and second engage with the information by interpreting it, connecting it to what we already know, etc..
- The working memory, where we process new information, is extremely limited in capacity when it has to deal with unfamiliar information. It can handle between 3 and 5 novel information items or chunks. And what happens if I overload the working memory?
- The learner freezes, stops responding, we get this blank stare from the audience and we know we have to restart, and if the learner is a Windows machine, this will take forever.
- Forth, Adults shift from learning for the future to learning for an immediate application. If I teach them something they do not need at the time, they will be less likely to pay attention.
- Fifth, adult learners approach leaning problem- or solution-focused rather than learning for the sake of learning. This can make things difficult if my material is concept-focused, so for instance if am trying to teach foundational knowledge or theories.
- Sixth, Certification and mandated training left aside, adults are more often intrinsically motivated to learn since they usually have more control over what type of learning activity they engage with. They really want to learn, if we manage to provide instruction that is effective for them.
- So how am I doing so far in adhering to Knowles Principles?
- I think that what I talked about is relevant to you, that you are ready to reflect on your teaching and that you are internally motivated and not just here for the cocktails.
- I already admitted that I struggle with techniques to support self-directedness.
- But I think it is high time to bring some life experience and problem-orientation to this session. For this, I want to ask for help: Alyson, Chris and Aimee can you please come up here?