The Adult Learner
An adult’s willingness to learn is not related to his or her ability to learn.
Adult learners may be "education wounded" from earlier learning experiences and require "unlearning" to become an effective adult learner.
Adult learners are more than just machines processing information. Adult learners come with a mind, memories, conscious and subconscious worlds, emotions, imagination and a physical body, all of which interact with learning.
The adult learning process is much more than the systematic acquisition and storage of information. It is also making sense of our lives, transforming not just what we learn but the way we learn and it is absorbing, imagining, intuiting and learning informally with others.
Adult Learners
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Sometimes barriers such as time, attitude towards learning and programs that ignore best practice in adult learning block internal motivation.
The Science of Adult Learning
The learning experience has to feel good. When adults feel positive about a situation, endorphins are released, making them feel good and open to learning, and dopamine stimulates the pre-frontal cortex keeping them attentive and likely to remember the learning.
Professional development that begins with a message of, "You teachers have failed your kids, let us teach you the right way to do this job," isn 't going to work. Negative feelings (including feeling like you 've been forced to attend a PD) cause the hormone cortisol to enter the blood stream. This catapults the brain into survival mode, and shifts the brain 's attention away from learning and into dealing with stress. Instead of learning, the brain remembers the pressure and registers PD as unpleasant.
A “fear of failure” climate encourages survival behavior, not learning behavior and promotes patterned, routine, and procedure oriented responses.
Past Experiences and
Adults are self-motivated. They learn best by building on what they already know and when they are actively engaged (Lindeman, 2010). The approach of adult education revolves around non-vocational ideals and is based on experience rather than subjects (Lindeman, 2010). It helps adults gain knowledge about their powers, capacities, and limitations (Funnell et al, 2012).
Individuals are differ in their learning style. It is depend on how people learn based on ability to comprehend and retain information. Adult have more life experience to build on and competing responsibilities. The unique about adult learner is adult generally are more resistant to new ideas, autonomous, self-directed, goal oriented and relevancy oriented. Learning styles will be influence by their genetic make-up, previous learning experiences, culture and the society they live in. There are many ways of looking at learning styles, one of the learning style is Kolb’s experiential learning style. Kolb’s (1984) identify four types of learning styles; convergent, divergent, assimilator and accommodator. Experiential learning style is the process
Essex, Belinda and Sean O’Toole. “The Adult Learner May Really Be a Neglected Species.” Australian Journal of Adult Learning (2012) Print.
Courtney I have to agree with your first characteristic, the adult learners have “readiness to learn things that are relevant to their job and personal life”. We are more motivated to learn something when we are sure that we would have a used for it. As we become older, time is more valuable and we are more motivated to use it more wisely.
Since as far back as the 1940’s, psychologists and philosophers had a theory that adults had particular ways in which they learned. Researchers believed that the practice and education should reflect these particulars in order to properly engage adults. This paper will go into the theory behind adult learning and a few influential people behind the theories. It will look at learner centered approaches to adult learning. This paper will also define the different learning styles as well as how to engage those learning styles. For the purpose of this paper an adult is defined as an individual in the age range of 18 or older, someone who has really started to experience life.
Being a teacher of adult education is a very demanding job. It requires an absolute commitment towards embedding real-life tasks into the curriculum to make learning more meaningful and purposeful for adults (Early & DeCosta, 2007, p.1). At the heart of it, teaching adults really is about being flexible enough to address the needs of an individual student; being creative enough to challenge adult students’ ways of thinking; and finally being sensitive enough to understand that some students’ paths towards higher education can be more challenging than ours (Early & DeCosta, 2007, p.2). In other words, a good teacher of adult education is a teacher who is able to inspire and motivate students to think differently, read and write meaningfully, and communicate purposefully.
Mirriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A
Merriam, S.B., Caffarella, R.S. &Baumgartner (2007) Learning in Adulthood: A comprehensive guide, san Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass
One theorist that is relevant to this study is Malcolm Knowles’s theory of adult learning. Though Malcom Knowles may not be the first one to introduce adult learning, he was the one that introduced andragogy in North America. (McEwen and Wills 2014). Andragogy means adult learning. The core concept of Knowles’s Adult learning theory is to create a learning environment or awareness for adults to understand why they learn .Knowles developed six main assumptions of adult learners. Those assumptions are the need to know, self- concept, experience, readiness to learn, orientation to learning and motivation. (McEwen and Wills, 2014)
The learning process for adults is never ending and can be very challenging. As an adult educator, teaching adult learners you will face many challenges in the learning process. It is our responsibility to keep the learners engaged, and to help them to realize their full learning potential.
Analysis: having been through the adult learning experience I have realised the roll of learner and teacher in this approach. An effective teacher can facilitate the development of independence, self confidence, learning satisfaction and help students (the learner) to critical think. This experience has taught me that there are different styles of learning and teaching that I can adopt in my future.
As we know, human being keep learning though all their lives, Sometimes I am thinking how we adult learning. In this book, I found them--some related concepts about adult learning and ways to Self-Direct Learning(SDL). Before reading this book. I already knew what is the adult learner is. In China, students who are over 18 years old are the adult in General Principles Of the Civil Law. In some perspectives, University education can be called adult education. It is new for me to learn this knowledge, so I chose the first eight chapters of the textbook.
Prior Experience- Adults have a lot of previous experiments which may help them understand situations better, or it may make them biased toward learning new material, ideals or strategies.
Adult learning does not occur in a vacuum. What one needs or wants to learn, what opportunities are available, the manner in which one learns-all are to a large extent determined by the society in which one lives. Whenever adults are asked about their learning, they most often mention education and training programs sponsored by the workplace, colleges and universities, public schools, and other formal organizations. They first picture classrooms with “students” learning and “teachers” teaching in a highly structured format. Yet when we ask these same adults about what they have learned informally over the last year, they typically respond with descriptions of learning activities outside these formal settings. They discuss, for example, remodeling a house, which has involved everything form reading and talking...
Within the andragogical model described by Knowles, Holton, and Swanson (2015), adults need learning experiences that are different than those found in the pedagogical model. Instead of waiting for experiences that are directed and controlled by a teacher, adults need to have a clear rationale and understanding for the learning, feel past experiences are valuable, and have a developed internal system for motivation in order to help a learning experience be successful. The connection and orientation to the learning task, the readiness to learn, and self-concept are other important ideas to adult learning.