Nature of Adult Learner

1. Nature of Adult Learner INSPIRING CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE MINDS

2. Why do you learn? • To stay mentally alert • Learning is a satisfying activity • Learn for my own sake • Future change • Family reason • Loneliness

3. In which of the following ways had you hoped this course would be helpful to you? • Becoming a better-informed person • Preparing for a future job • Spending my spare time more enjoyably • Meeting new and interesting people • Carrying out everyday tasks at home • Getting away from the daily routine • Others?

4. Motivational Orientations of Learners • Why adults do or do not participate in adult education is an important question having implications for both theory and practice. • The work in motivational orientation beginning with Houle’s study has sought to provide a richer picture of the motives underlying participation. • Houle’s tripartite typology of goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented learners stimulated dozens of investigations into the learning orientations of adults.

5. Motivational Orientations of Learners • Goal-oriented learners: who use education as a means of achieving some other goal. This type of learners were easiest to understand because they saw education as a means of responding to a personal need.

6. Motivational Orientations of Learners • Activity-oriented learners: who participate for the sake of the activity itself and the social interaction. Motivated by social contact or just the idea of doing something. • Mostly their reasons were particular and tied to specific or personal circumstances: loneliness, seeking to escapism • Some had been engaged in education so long they had forgotten why they had started in the first place

7. Motivational Orientations of Learners • Learning-oriented learners: who seek knowledge for its own sake. They had always had the “itch to learn”. • Most were avid readers and had been since childhood. • “the desire to know”

8. ADULT LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 1. Respecting all participants, including their experiences, diversity and background. 2. Fosters intellectual freedom and encourages experimentation and creativity. 3. Promoting self-directed learning, where learners take responsibility for their own learning. 4. Maintaining intellectual challenge and stimulation. 5. Active participation in the learning process, as opposed to passively listening to lectures. 6. Providing regular feedback both to the learner and trainer. (Billington 2004)

9. Creating the Optimal Learning Environment for the Adult Learner Our role as teachers then is to create an atmosphere that allows our students to assume responsibility for their learning. The optimal learning environment: • encourages students to be active participants in their own education; • promotes and facilitates the student’s discovery of the personal meaning of ideas; • encourages autonomy in the student; • provides safety which acknowledges that mistakes will occur, and that we can learn from these mistakes; • establishes respect for the student; and • encourages candor (openness/frankness) and self-evaluation from the student.

10. Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Adult Learning Programs • An environment where students feel safe and supported, where individual needs and uniqueness are honored, where abilities and life achievements are acknowledged and respected. • An environment that fosters intellectual freedom and encourages experimentation and creativity.

11. Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Adult Learning Programs 3 An environment where faculty treats adult students as peers--accepted and respected as intelligent experienced adults whose opinions are listened to, honored, appreciated. Such faculty members often comment that they learn as much from their students as the students learn from them 4. Self-directed learning, where students take responsibility for their own learning. They work with faculty to design individual learning programs which address what each person needs and wants to learn in order to function optimally in their profession.

12. Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Adult Learning Programs 5. Pacing, or intellectual challenge. Optimal pacing is challenging people just beyond their present level of ability. If challenged too far beyond, people give up. If challenged too little, they become bored and learn little. Pacing can be compared to playing tennis with a slightly better player; your game tends to improve. But if the other player is far better and it's impossible to return a ball, you give up, overwhelmed. If the other player is less experienced and can return none of your balls, you learn little. Those adults who reported experiencing high levels of intellectual stimulation--to the point of feeling discomfort--grew more.

13. Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Adult Learning Program 6. Active involvement in learning, as opposed to passively listening to lectures. Where students and instructors interact and dialogue, where students try out new ideas in the workplace, where exercises and experiences are used to bolster facts and theory, adults grow more. 7. Regular feedback mechanisms for students to tell faculty what works best for them and what they want and need to learn--and faculty who hear and make changes based on student input.

14. Barriers to Participation • The two most often cited reasons for non participation are lack of time and money. • Other reasons found by researchers: • Time and unawareness of educational activities available • 3 categories of barriers: External or situational barriers; internal or dispositional; institutional barriers. Situational – relating to a person’s situation at a given time. Dispositional – arising from a person’s attitude toward self and learning. Institutional – consisting of all those practices and procedures that exclude or discourage working adults from participating in educational activities. • Barriers to participation have been investigated using various forms of the Deterrents to Participation Scale (DPS) developed by Darkenwald and colleagues.

15. Model Halangan terhadap penyertaanScanlan dan Darkenwald (1984) Sikap Situasi Halangan Institusi

16. Model Halangan terhadap penyertaanMerriam dan Caffarella (1999) Situasi Institusi Halangan Informasi sikap

17. Who participate in adult education? • Kebanyakan kajian di barat mendapati golongan yang paling aktif menyertai aktiviti pembelajaran dewasa adalah mereka yang:- • 1. Muda (awal dewasa) • 2. Mempunyai pekerjaan tetap • 3. Berpendidikan tinggi • 4. Pendapatan tinggi • 5. Lelaki • 6. Tinggal di bandar (Merriam dan Caffarella, 1999)

18. Do adults and children learn differently? • MalcolmKnowles defines several components of learning for adults, which he claims are different from the learning needs of children. First, adults need to be self-directed in their learning because they are maturing and moving away from the dependency of children. Second, adults have a vast reservoir of experience, which is rich resource for learning and suggests that adult learners learn best through experiential techniques. Third, adults choose to learn some thing in order meet more immediate needs in their lives where as children learn because they are told to learn things that will have some relevance in the distant future. In addition, according to Piaget and other developmental theorists, children complete several stages of cognitive, emotional and physical development, which are presumably complete for the adult learner. We have compared all of the above components for both children and adult learners and examined the implications for educators working with young and mature learners.

19. A Sociology Perspective • Explanations of participation have been advanced from a sociological rather than a psychological perspective. • People’s decisions to participate have less to do with needs and motives than with their position in society and the social experiences that have shaped their lives. • If one holds that individual interests and motivation account for participation, then recruitment efforts would center on responding to an adults perceived learning needs and stimulating motivation. • If one hold that participation or nonparticipation is seen as a function of the social structure, then one would work toward changing society in ways that would facilitate participation.

20. A Sociology Perspective • The variables of age, sex, and educational background, which are correlated with participation, can be understood as reproductions of the divisions of labor in society.