Adult Learners On Campus

H.B. Slotnick, Mary Helen Pelton, Mary Lou Fuller, Lila Tabor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750701150
• eBook ISBN: 9781135722203
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The opportunity for a "second chance" is a growing phenomenon. Some members of the Adult Learners Consulting Group, a dozen or so faculty and graduate students at the University of Dakota, who have a general interest in the related processes of learning and teaching, investigated the specific concern about the ways older-than-average students learn and the instructional methods most appropriate for them. They recognized that for both the older student and the teacher of the older student there are problems and issues that are different from the average student or student/teacher relationship. In addition to presenting an integrated picture of adult learners on campus, this book also provides some teaching techniques that can be used in the classroom tomorrow.; It is aimed at teachers in further and adult education, trainers in all disciplines, researchers in adult and continuing education.

Part I
A Background on Adult Learners

Introduction

Part I of this book provides background on Adult Learners from the perspectives of both how they learn and changes in cognitive ability and identity. Chapter 1 (‘Adult learners’) describes attributes of adults with particular reference to aspects of them and their lives which impact on what and how much they learn. Of particular interest is Andragogy, a framework for viewing adults and adult learners in contrast to pedagogy—the ways in which children learn. Some attributes important in this contrast include the reasons for learning, the ways in which students participate in their learning, the goals learners have, and the roles played by teachers.

Chapter 2 (‘Adult development’) attends particularly to questions of cognitive and identity development. These topics are important because they are intimately related to the changes that occur in students—whether Young Adult or Adult—due to the experience of attending the university. The issues of cognitive and identity changes will figure prominently in the conclusions we draw from our study and the recommendations we make at the book’s end.

Chapter 1
Adult Learners

Confessions of a 31-year-old Law student:

I was a typical teenager—I didn’t know what I wanted to do. As an undergraduate I pursued two or three different courses of study. I think that is pretty normal, unless you’re really certain what you want to do, and I wasn’t. I think that in general terms, the older you get, the more you realize that you could have been a lot more efficient—done a better job. But you just can’t explain that to somebody; they have to experience it themselves. As you mature, you realize that if you really want something, you’re responsible and you’re going to have to work for it. Once you’ve been out in the world, you realize that it is going to take a lot of work to reach your goals.

I feel much more in control of my life than I did when I was a traditional age student, although I think Adult learners feel much more self-imposed pressure than younger students. The person who is first in our law school class is thirty-two, I am second, the person who is third is younger (twenty-six) but took a couple of years off, and the individual that is fourth is a civil engineer [who] has been out at least half a dozen years. I think that this is fairly indicative of the type of pressure that we [Adult learners] put on ourselves.

Jerry

Introduction

This quote suggests a number of things about the Adult learner: they know what they want, they’re willing to work hard to get it, and there are a number of them around. Though we will return to issues such as Adult learners’ needs and the way these students approach learning later in this chapter, we will first look at the size of the Adult learner population and the rate at which that population is growing.

The size of the Adult population is considerable (at the beginning of the academic year in which we conducted our study, 1.6 million of the 7.2 million fulltime students were over 24 years of age. This means that, on average, 22 per cent of the students in our classes are Adult learners. What is more, the number of the Adult students in college is increasing at an impressive rate, and demographers project that, as we move toward the year 2000, the largest increases in the college student population will continue to be the 25–44 year old group.

The number of older students has been growing more rapidly than the number of younger students. Between 1970 and 1985, the enrollment of students under age 25 increased by 15 per cent. During the same period, enrollment of persons 25 and over rose by 114 per cent. In the latter part of this period from 1980 to 1985, enrollments of students under 24 decreased by 5 per cent, while the enrollment of persons 25 and over increased by 12 per cent. (Snyder, 1991, p. 47)

Even in the face of dramatic increases in the adult student population, professors often fail to address sufficient attention to older students. We suspect that some of these faculty see the numbers of older students as having no educational implications while others consider this growing population a short-livedphenomenon. Both of these views are wrong: Older students are a growing, important, vital, and permanent feature of the university.

Adult learners bring a variety of life experiences with them to the university, experiences giving them a perspective and a sense of purpose not found in the younger student’s tool kit for dealing with and profiting from higher education. These students know who they are, they know what they want, and they have a pretty good idea of how the system works. They are, in a phrase, sophisticated consumers who will make their needs known and will work hard at having them met. This means that as the numbers of adult learners increase, faculty will have to become more sensitive to their personal, academic, and professional needs. And skillful teachers will also find ways to draw on these students’ experiences in the process of responding to their needs.

Who Are Adult Learners?

Who are these adult learners? What is known about them? And how do we organize our thinking about them? The term ‘Adult learners’ (‘older-than-average’is often used as a synonym) refers to persons 25 years old and older who are engaged in learning experiences. Those experiences may be as informal as casual pursuit of a subject of interest or joining others to learn new skills, or they may be as formal as taking a night class or pursuing a degree program. Our particular interest in adult learners addresses the formal end of the continuum— adult college students, whether undergraduate or more advanced.

While there are excellent studies pertaining to the adult students (e.g., Cross, 1981; Apps, 1981), contemporary beliefs about the education of adults nevertheless include a lot of speculation. These beliefs might be labeled the ‘folk wisdom’ of adult education because they are agreed upon and accepted even though they are untested. In studying students on our campus, we wished to limit ourselves to those assertions which were empirically defensible, and we did this by addressing the three goals of this study: identifying certain characteristics of traditional age and adult students generally; using these characteristics to provide an integrated picture of students on campus; and contrasting our population of students with students nationally.

Terminology

Given these goals, we decided to stratify the population of students on campus, a task we approached by considering two attributes of students: their ages and college in which they are enrolled. Considering age, and as noted earlier, we called the older-than-average students (25 and over) Adults and the traditional-agestudents (24 and younger) Young Adults. Since our study included Graduate and Professional students (that is, law and medical students) who are commonly over 24 years of age, this terminology is highly appropriate; it allowed us to avoid an artificial distinction (traditional versus older-than-average) for these groups.

As we mentioned earlier, we also stratified the population of students by College (Undergraduate, Graduate, and Professional) producing six strata when Age (Young Adult and Adult) is considered as well. We anticipated that dividing the population in these ways would provide informative contrasts yielding useful insights into the similarities and differences among student groups.

Perspective on Adults and Adult Learning

Our view of the adult learner was influenced by our adopting a humanistic perspective toward teaching and learning: We believe there is a natural tendency for people to learn and that learning will flourish if a nourishing, encouraging environment is provided. We also believe that, although there is great diversity in the nature and lives of adults, there are predictable patterns (developmental stages, for example) experienced by most adults. This view is hardly new to those familiar with the human development literature, a literature enriched by Carl Jung, Robert Havighurst, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Daniel J.Levinson, among others.

We were also influenced by research on adult learners, particularly the later work of Malcolm Knowles (e.g., 1980, 1984). Knowles, based upon his research and his reading of the literature, feels that there is sufficient information available ‘to warrant attempts to organize it [the available information] into a systematic framework of assumptions, principles, and strategies’ (1984, p. 7). His construction of such a framework, called andragogy, is concerned with teaching adults (versus pedagogy which is concerned with teaching children), and combines elements of humanistic psychology with a systems approach to learning. John Dewey, E.H.Erikson, Jerome Bruner, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers give andragogy its theoretical and philosophical bases.

Some theorists correctly question whether andragogy is a theory (Cross, 1981; Brookfield, 1986; Haertree, 1984; Houle, 1972), and Knowles (1984) responded by saying, ‘I don’t know if it is a theory…I feel more comfortable thinking of it [andragogy] as a system of concepts…’ (pp. 7–8). And, indeed, andragogy works well as a system of concepts providing a perspective on the adult learner.

Andragogy Versus Pedagogy

Concept of the Learner

As Knowles (1980) views pedagogy, the learner is a dependent person and the teacher has full responsibility for making all curricular decisions. The learner in andragogy, in contrast, is self directed; these learners typically make their own decisions concerning their educations—as demonstrated by Jerry (A, P) in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. This was particularly true for our Adult population with Young Adults approaching this position.

In pedagogy, learners are passive and curricular material is generally transmitted to them by lecture, assigned readings, and audio-visual presentations. Further, learners have had few life experiences to use in interpreting what they are learning. In contrast, andragogy attributes to the adult learners many and varied life experiences (due both to having lived longer and having played a variety of roles such as student, parent, employee, and so on) which they bring into the classroom along with specific needs to be addressed by instruction. The result is that Adult learners are more active in pursuing their learning and better able to see the importance and limitations of what they learn. We find that Young Adults appear to be in a transition between the children described by pedagogy and the Adults described by andragogy.

In situations appropriate to pedagogy, the learner is presented with a curriculum for a given grade level which implies that readiness for learning is largely a function of grade (age). The fact that what a child needs to learn is determined by grade level is simply another way of saying that a child of one age studies this, one of another age studies that. Curricular decisions, in other words, are made for the students. The andragogical model, in contrast, assumes that adults become ready to learn when they feel a need to know or have a need to perform more effectively in some area of life. In other words, adults make decisions about when children are ready to learn, and adults also make decisions about when they are ready to begin their own learning.

There are important ways in which the undergraduate (and even the law and medical) curricula are like the pedagogical curricula just described. At first appearance, students simply present themselves and are exposed to whatever the curriculum has to offer. This is much less the case for older students who have generally more well-developed reasons for wanting to take specific courses or enroll in entire curricula.

Children and adults also have different orientations to learning. For the child, stress is placed on learning outcomes rather than the process of learning—as is the case with the instruction of Adults. In short, the orientation in pedagogy is subject-centered and the goal is mastery of the content. But because adults enter the learning environment with a specific need to know, their orientation is more life (process) centered than product (content) centered. Thus the Adult, having learned, is in a better position to continue learning than is the child.

We will show, in a subsequent chapter, that Young Adults are typically in the process of separating from their families of origin and thus are in the process of gaining Adults’ life experiences. Because this process has just started for them, they do not yet have the rich backgrounds enjoyed by the Adults with whom they share their classes. (This last point can be seen at the end of this chapter in the biographies of the Young Adults we interviewed for this study. Some Young Adults, like Charles, are just beginning this process while others, like Rhonda and David, are further along.) There is an important difference in the motivation of Adults and children toward learning. Children are motivated by external pressures (parents, teachers, grades, and so on) while Adults are more internally motivated. Knowles states that, ‘Although it is acknowledged that adults will respond to some external motivators—a better job, a salary increase, and the like—the andragogical model predicates that the more potent motivators are internal—self-esteem, recognition, better quality of life, greater self-confidence, self-actualization, and the like’ (1984, p. 12). Adults learn because they want to—not because someone else wants them to. As noted, we believe that Young Adults are in a transitional state approaching the motivational status of Adults.

Implications

Knowles describes Adult learners as self-directed people who are responsible for their own lives and who need to be recognized as such. We agree with this view and feel that it carries educational implications for faculty who teach Adults. First, Adults have had a multitude of varied life experiences making them, as a group, highly diverse. And this, combined with the facts that Adults are internally motivated and appear in learning settings with their own goals for attending, means they have a greater need for individualization of the instruction they receive.

Given that Adults recognize their own needs and see themselves as responsible for seeing that those needs are addressed, it is not surprising that Adults seek learning when they are ready. They also expect their needs to be addressed by that learning, and this means faculty must take these needs into consideration when organizing curricula and instruction for Adults.

Second, Adults normally reserve to themselves the option of deciding to participate in learning experiences, decisions they make based on whether they feel participation will address their needs. This, in turn, implies that Adult learners must understand both what the outcomes of instruction will be and how those outcomes will address their reasons for seeking instruction.

Finally, Adult learners rely more heavily than Young Adults on internal rewards for their efforts. They will decide whether they’ve been successful or not. In a word, ‘knowing one’s own needs, deciding when and how to address them, and responding to internal rewards are characteristics of adult learners worthy of educators’ attention’ (Cross, 1981, p. 227).

Andragogy and This Study

The visibility of andragogy has heightened awareness of the need for answers to three major questions: Is it useful to distinguish the learning needs of adults from those of children?, What are we really seeking: Theories of learning? Theories of teaching? Both? Does andragogy lead to researchable questions that will advance our knowledge in adult education? (Cross, 1981).

Of Cross’s questions, only the first was of particular interest to us. Not only did we ask if it was useful to distinguish the learning needs of Adults from Young Adults, but we first needed to determine if there actually were differences. Does andragogy posit a clear cut dichotomy between the adult and child learner?

Being neither a defensive nor a stubborn sort, Knowles readily admits that he’s fine tuned his andragogical assumptions over the years. What ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Thirteen People who Helped Us Understand Adult Learners
• Part I: A Background on Adult Learners
• Part II: Our Study and Its Findings
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Appendix B: Survey Instrument and Letters to Respondents
• Annotated Bibliography: Books on Adult Learners
• References