Understanding Adult Learning Theory.

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ASSIGNMENT 1

NELSON PILAY

Introduction

Adults today are confronted with an environment of constant change and rapid shifts.  Technology has altered the very nature of business and this had greatly influenced the employment market.  Jobs requiring expertise and technical skills are growing in nearly every sector of the economy.  The continuous change in what employees need to know and be able to handle suggests that learning, training and education will occur over the length of a career and, in fact, a lifetime.  In light of this, adults have had to become life-long learners by consistently challenging themselves to pursue learning opportunities.

Thus, a large and growing segment of the education industry more so for the post graduate courses are made of “non-traditional” students.  These are working adults who are interested in enhancing their job skills, retooling for new positions and careers, and pursuing other customised learning experiences.  With the changing trend in the employment market, higher learning institutions are experiencing increased demand for a larger variety of rapid paced educational resource options for the adult learning community.

However, one of the greatest challenges faced by higher learning institutions is identifying instructional or delivery methods that enhance adult learning process.  Thus the objective of any higher learning institutions should be to provide and establish learning objectives which are attainable by students and to use the appropriate instructional method in order that these objectives be met.  This paper will explore the opportunities available for working adults to further their studies and also identify the instructional methods in delivering lessons.

Understanding Adult Learning Theory

        Education helps in the development of the human mind, and it increases the powers of observations, analysis, integration, understanding, decision making, and adjustment to new situations.  In other words, education is concerned with increasing one’s knowledge and understanding the total environment.  Among the major research areas of learning are the self-directed learning, critical reflection, experiential learning and learning to learn.

        The first, self-directed learning is one that uses past experience as a resource base for learning, fitting new knowledge into current work and personal life situations. This brings with it real-life problem- solving and time-management advantages for the time-conscious student. The second, known as critical reflection, Brookfield (1991) observes it as the psychological development of an adult. This would relate to a host of constructs such as embedded logic, dialectical thinking, working intelligence, reflective judgement, post-formal reasoning and epistemic cognition which explain how adults come to think contextually and critically. As for experiential learning introduced by Liademan (1926), the emphasis is on the experience of the working adult. Adult education is therefore a continuing process of evaluating experience, which is central to the concept of andragogy that has evolved to describe adult education. The fourth; learning to learn, is about the ability of adults seen in a range of different situations and through a range of different styles. Both the concepts of epistemic cognition and reflective judgement were introduced in this process of learning to learn.

With that lets explore the learning theories which are the basic materials usually applied in all educational activities.  Understanding the learning theories is paramount for the adult learner to make decisions and apply them to achieving the objectives. Various schools of thought on theories of learning like the behaviourists, the cognitivists, and the humanists emphasise different aspects of the teaching learning process in their approaches.  While the behaviourists stress external conditions (environment) resulting in observations and measurable changes in behaviour.  The cognitivists are more concerned with how the mind works (mental processes such as coding, categorising and representing information in memory).  The humanists, on the other hand, emphasise the affective aspects of human behaviour that influence learning.  Effective education system must be able to take care of the entire theorist of learning in order to change the action, belief and knowledge components of an adult learning system.  The andragogy model of instruction (a theory of adult learning) is usually used rather than pedagogy (a theory of child learning) in most of the postgraduate courses.

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The pedagogical model of instruction is the foremost instructional method used in delivering lessons.  This mode of teaching is also known as the traditional or teacher-directed approach.  Knowles,  (1990), mentions that pedagogy is derived from the Greek word “paid” meaning child plus “agogos”, meaning leading.  Thus, pedagogy has been defined as the art and science of teaching children.  The traditional teaching in this context is teacher centred instruction in which teachers do most of the talking and instructing while students do a lot of passive listening and memorising.  This type of teaching is best characterised by the phrase; the teacher ...

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