Unit 2
2.6 Thirty Things We Know for Sure About Adult Learning

Thirty Things We Know for Sure About Adult Learning
By Ron Zemeke and Susan Zemeke
www.pcma.org/publications/AdultsLearn/thirtythings1.htm

We don’t know a lot about the mechanisms of adult learning. At least, not in the “What are the minimum — necessary and sufficient — conditions for effecting a permanent change in an adult’s behavior?” sense of knowing.

Still, from a variety of sources there emerges a body of fairly reliable knowledge about adult learning — arbitrarily, 30 points that lend themselves to three basic divisions:

	Things we know about adult learners and their motivation.
	Things we know about designing curricula for adults.
	Things we know about working with adults in the classroom.

These aren’t be-all, end-all categories. They overlap more than just a little bit. But they help us understand what the research says about adult learning.

Motivation to Learn
Adult learners can’t be threatened, coerced, or tricked into learning something new. Birch rods and gold stars have minimum impact. Adults can be ordered into a classroom and prodded into a seat, but they cannot be forced to learn. Though trainers are often faced with adults who have been sent to training, there are some insights to be garnered from the research on adults who seek out a structured learning experience on their own. It’s something we all do at least twice a year, the research says. We begin our running tally from this base camp.

1-Adults seek out learning experiences in order to cope with specific life-change events. Marriage, divorce, a new job, and moving to a new city are examples.

2-The more life-change events an adult encounters, the more likely he or she is to seek out learning opportunities. Just as stress increases as life-changing events accumulate, the motivation to cope with change through engagement in a learning experience increases. Since the people who most frequently seek out learning opportunities are people who have the most years of education, it is reasonable to guess that for many of us learning is a coping response to significant change.

3-The learning experiences adults seek out on their own are directly related — at least in their own perceptions — to the life-change events that triggered the seeking. Therefore, if 80 percent of the change being encountered is work-related, then 80 percent of the learning experiences sought should be work-related.

4-Adults are generally willing to engage in learning experiences before, after, or even during the actual life-change event. Once convinced that the change is a certainty, adults will engage in any learning that promises to help them cope with the transition.

5-Although adults have been found to engage in learning for a variety of reasons — job advancement, pleasure, love of learning, and so on — it is equally true that for most adults learning is not its own reward. Adults who are motivated to seek out a learning experience do so primarily (80 percent to 90 percent of the time) because they have a use for knowledge or skill being sought. Learning is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

6-Increasing or maintaining one’s sense of self-esteem and pleasure are strong secondary motivators for engaging in learning experiences. Having a new skill or extending and enrichingcurrent knowledge can be both, depending on the individual’s personal perceptions.

Curriculum Design
Historically, many societies have equated youth with the ability to insatiably acquire information, and age with the ability to wisely use information. Research suggests this is true — that wisdom is, in fact, a separate intellectual function that develops as we grow older. This phenomenon leads to some particular implications for curriculum development.

7-Adult learners tend to be less interested in, and enthralled by, survey courses. They tend to prefer single-concept, single-theory courses that focus heavily on the application of the concept to relevant problems. This tendency increases with age.

8-Adults need to be able to integrate new ideas with what they already know if they are going to keep — and use — the new information.

9- Information that conflicts sharply with what is already held to be true, and thus forces a re-evaluation of the old material, is integrated more slowly.

10-Information that has little “conceptual overlap” with what is already known is acquired slowly.

11-Fast-paced, complex, or unusual learning tasks interfere with the learning of the concepts or data they are intended to teach or illustrate
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12-Adults tend to compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures.

13-Adults tend to take errors personally and are more likely to let them affect self-esteem. Therefore, they tend to apply tried-and-true solutions and take fewer risks. There is even evidence that adults will misinterpret feedback and “mistake” errors for positive confirmation.

14-The curriculum designer must know whether the concepts and ideas will be in concert or in conflict with learner and organizational values. As trainers at AT&T have learned, moving from a service to a sales philosophy requires more than a change in words and titles. It requires a change in the way people think and what they value.

15-Programs need to be designed to accept viewpoints from people in different life stages and with different value “sets.”

16-A concept needs to be explained from more than one value set and appeal to more than one developmental life stage.

17-Adults prefer self-directed and self-designed learning projects 7 to 1 over group-learning experiences led by a professional. Furthermore, the adult learner often elects more than one medium for the design. Reading and talking to a qualified peer are frequently cited as good resources. The desire to control pace and start/stop time strongly affects the self-directed preference.

18-Non-human media such as television and the Internet have become popular in recent years. One piece of research found such media very influential in the way adults plan self-directed learning projects.

19-Regardless of media, straightforward how-to is the preferred content orientation. As many as 80 percent of the polled adults in one study cited the need for applications and how-to information as the primary motivation for undertaking a learning project

20-Self-direction does not mean isolation. In fact, studies of self-directed learning show self-directed projects involve an average of 10 other people as resources, guides, encouragers, and the like. The incompetence or inadequacy of these same people is often rated as a primary frustration. But even for the self-professed, self-directed learner, lectures and short seminars get positive ratings, especially when these events give the learner face-to-face, one-to-one access to an expert.

In the Classroom
We seem to know the least about helping the adult maximize the classroom experience. There certainly are volumes of opinion and suggestion, but by and large they rest more on theory than hard data. Ironically, some of the strongest data comes from survey studies of what turns off adults in the classroom. Likewise, there is a nicely developing body of literature on what makes for good and bad meetings that has implications for adult learning.

21-The learning environment must be physically and psychologically comfortable. Adults report that long lectures, periods of interminable sitting, and the absence of practice opportunities are high on the irritation scale.

22-Adults have something real to lose in a classroom situation. Self-esteem and ego are on the line when they are asked to risk trying a new behavior in front of peers and cohorts. Bad experiences in traditional education, feelings about authority, and the preoccupation with events outside the classroom all affect in-class experience.

23-Adults have expectations, and it is critical to take time up front to clarify and articulate all expectations before getting into content. Both trainees and the instructor/facilitator need to state their expectations. When they are at variance, the problem should be acknowledged and a resolution negotiated. In any case, the instructor can assume responsibility only for his or her own expectations, not for those of trainees.

24-Adults bring a great deal of life experience into the classroom, an invaluable asset to be acknowledged, tapped, and used. Adults can learn well — and much — from dialogue with respected peers.

25-Instructors who have a tendency to hold forth rather than facilitate can hold that tendency in check — or compensate for it — by concentrating on the use of open-ended questions to draw out relevant participant knowledge and experience.

26-New knowledge has to be integrated with previous knowledge; that means active learner participation. Since only the learners can tell us how the new fits or fails to fit with the old, we have to ask them. Just as the learner is dependent on us for confirming feedback on skill practice, we are dependent on the learner for feedback about our curriculum and in-class performance.

27-The key to the instructor role is control. The instructor must balance the presentation of new material, debate and discussion, sharing of relevant participant experiences, and the clock. Ironically, we seem best able to establish control when we risk giving it up. When we shelve our egos and stifle the tendency to be threatened by challenge to our plans and methods, we gain the kind of facilitator control we seem to need to effect adult learning.

28-The instructor has to protect minority opinion, keep disagreements civil and unheated, make connections between various opinions and ideas, and keep reminding the group of the variety of potential solutions to the problem. Just as in a good problem-solving meeting, the instructor is less an advocate than an orchestrator.

29-ntegration of new knowledge and skill requires transition time and focused effort. Working on applications to specific back-on-the-job problems helps with the transfer. Action plans, accountability strategies, and follow-up after training all increase the likelihood of that transfer. Involving the trainees’ supervisor in pre- and post-course activities helps with both in-class focus and transfer

30-Teaching theories function better as a resource than as a Rosetta stone. The instructor of adults needs an eclectic rather than a single theory-based approach to developing strategies and procedures. .