Training Tips

Adult Learning: What You Need To Know

Many sources provide us with a body of fairly reliable knowledge about adult learning. This knowledge might be divided into three basic divisions: things we know about adult learners and their motivation, things we know about designing curriculum for adults, and things we know about working  with adults in the classroom.

Motivation to Learn

  1. Adults seek out learning experiences in order to cope with specific life-changing events — e.g., marriage, divorce, a new job, a promotion, being fired, retiring, losing a loved one, moving to a new city.
  2. The more life-changing 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.
  3. Adults who are motivated to seek out a learning experience do so primarily because they have a use for the knowledge or skill being sought. Learning is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
  4. Increasing or maintaining one’s sense of self-esteem and pleasure are strong secondary motivators for engaging in learning experiences.

Curriculum Design

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Information that has little “conceptual overlap” with what is already known is acquired slowly.
  5. Fast-paced, complex, or unusual learning tasks interfere with the learning of the concepts or data they are intended to teach or illustrate.
  6. Adults tend to compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures.
  7. 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.
  1. Adults prefer self-directed and self-designed learning projects over group-learning experiences led by a professional, they select more than one medium for learning, and they desire to control pace and start/stop time.
  2. Regardless of media, straightforward how-to is the preferred content orientation. Adults cite a need for application and how-to information as the primary motivation for beginning a learning project.
  3. Self-direction does not mean isolation. Studies of self-directed learning indicate that self-directed projects involve an average of 10 other people as resources, guides, encouragers and the like. 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

  1. The learning environment must be physically and psychologically comfortable. Long lectures, periods of interminable sitting and the absence of practice opportunities rate high on the irritation scale.
  2. 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 affect in-class experience.
  3. New knowledge has to be integrated with previous knowledge; students must actively participate in the learning experience. The learner is dependent on the instructor for confirming feedback on skill practice; the instructor is dependent on the learner for feedback about curriculum and in-class performance.
  4. Integration of new knowledge and skill requires transition time and focused effort on application.

The next five years will eclipse the last fifty in terms of hard data production on adult learning. For the present, we must recognize that adults want their learning to be problem-oriented, personalized, and accepting of their need for self-direction and personal responsibility. n

This information was excerpted from an article by Ron and Susan Zemke in Innovation Abstracts Vol VI, No 8.