Adult Learning and Development: Perspectives from Educational Psychology by Smith and Pourchot - Literature review Example

Amima Kader ID# 207129] [EDUC 30110] [Professor’s name appears here] [Date appears here] Adult Learning and Development: Perspectives from Educational Psychology by M Cecil Smith and Thomas Pourchot Table of contents Overview to adult learning and development…………………………………………3 Rationale for adult educational psychology…………………………………………...4 Theoretical Perspective………………………………………………………………..7 Children to Adult development………………………………………………………..9 Knowing, learning and problem solving in adulthood………………………………..11 Role of parents in the development phase…………………………………………….13 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….13 Adult Learning and Development: Perspectives from Educational Psychology by M Cecil Smith and Thomas Pourchot I- Overview to adult learning and development Adult education, as a field in its own right, emerged during the 1950s as corporations began establishing training departments and providing a wide range of educational programs for employees. Perspectives on adult learning have changed dramatically over the decades. According to Cranton “Adult learning has been viewed as a process of being freed from the oppression of being illiterate, a means of gaining knowledge and skills, a way to satisfy learner needs, and a process of critical self-reflection that can lead to transformation. The phenomenon of adult learning is complex and difficult to capture in any one definition.” (Cranton, p.3) Traditionally, educational psychologists have studied individual differences in learning and development, and have made significant contributions to measurement, testing, instructional practices, and cognition, particularly as these subjects relate to schooling. For the most part the subjects of study in these investigations have been children, as educational psychologists were apparently content to focus their concerns on patterns of learning and change in childhood and adolescence. In fact, some writers have suggested that, during much of the first half of this century, educational psychologists were little interested in education having retreated to their laboratories. The problems of adult learning could not be said to occupy the minds and the work of educational psychologists. The educational psychologists whose work appears in this book recognize that learning and development occur both inside and outside of school, taking place in families, at work, and in other socializing contexts and situations. They understand that learning and development are lifelong processes. Adult life is complex and richly colored by many variables that affect these developmental and learning processes. Adults move in and out of personal relationships, marry and divorce, raise children, establish careers and work in one or more occupations over a period of four or more decades, care for aging parents and/or grandchildren, and confront their own aging (not always successfully). They interact with various social, communities, commercial, governmental, legal, and educational institutions across the whole of their lives. Adults confront and resolve problems, learn from their experiences (or fail to do so), and pass their knowledge -- and sometimes, wisdom -- on to their children. In modern society, it is recognized that education is a key to a more satisfying and productive life. Rapid changes in technology, workplaces, communications, and educational institutions have resulted in widespread awareness that education is limited not only to childhood and adolescence. II- Rationale for adult educational psychology The casual student of adult education might believe that educational psychology and adult education have little in common. After all, adult educators have generally concerned themselves with the advancement of adult learning in a wide variety of institutions and settings such as schools, churches, labor unions, libraries, and perhaps to less extent, formal learning within colleges and universities. Educational psychologists, on the other hand, have traditionally studied the instruction and learning of younger students in public schools. Thus, one might be surprised to learn that the “father of educational psychology,” Edward L. Thorndike published, in 1928, a book on adult learning which claimed that the ability to learn in adulthood was undiminished with age. Despite Thorndike’s contribution, historically, there has been little explicit connection between psychology and adult education although adult educators typically have some exposure to some theoretical perspectives on human development or principles of learning. I believe it is time, however, to move beyond these disciplinary boundaries and barriers and seek to establish a dialogue that leads to exchange of ideas, interaction of scholars, and increased attention to improving the lives and livelihood of adults through educational services and programs that attend to the psychological dimensions of adult learning. Several reasons can be offered for identifying the subfield of adult educational psychology and these reasons provide a basis for establishing a discourse that acknowledges the mutual interplay of developmental and educational psychology and adult education. First, there are growing numbers of adults in educational programs that range from adult basic education (ABE) and workplace literacy programs to corporate training seminars and university classes. The economic boom of the 1990s has led to the widespread recognition that workers need to be prepared to adapt to rapid changes in the work environment. As businesses, industries, and corporate concerns prosper, workers may be impacted in a number of ways. Some employees will be “downsized,” while others will be offered opportunities for advancement. In both of these scenarios, adults may seek job retraining or advanced training to meet new occupational demands. Non-English speaking immigrants seeking new and better lives in the United States need to become literate in English in order to secure good jobs and to take advantage of the social and cultural opportunities available to them and to assist their children in school. (Wagner & Venezky, pp. 21-29) Second, corresponding to the growth of adult education, the numbers of non-traditional, older students (age 25 and up) in undergraduate 2- and 4-year colleges continues to increase, reflecting demographic changes as the large population of baby boomers ages. Universities and colleges have been somewhat slow to respond to these demographic changes because of their historical focus on the 18-22 year old population. Increasingly, however, student services are being made available to non-traditional students, including weekend classes, short courses (e.g., 2, 4, 6 weeks), credit for “life experiences,” and so on. Because the average life span is increasing, older adults’ have increasingly greater opportunities for recreation and leisure, and desire for lifelong learning. Therefore, adult educators need to be aware of the characteristics and capacities of senior adult learners and to understand their motives for learning and the difficulties they face in returning to formal educational settings. (Scala, pp. 747-773) Third, given the rapid expansion of the adult education population, there is a need for a discipline that integrates, generates, and applies knowledge from studies in adult development, cognitive aging, and educational psychology to adult learning and education. Practitioners can benefit from having access to a knowledge base that will inform them about effective ways to stage instruction for learners with diverse needs, interests, skills, and backgrounds. Policymakers can benefit from theoretical and research bases that suggest how programs might be best developed to meet the learning needs of diverse populations. Researchers can benefit from having access to a readily-defined body of knowledge and scholarship. Fourth, although a few recent adult education textbooks have attended to psychological development in adulthood these are the exception rather than the rule. While adult educators talk about “learning” and intellectual “transformation,” (Mezirow, pp. 222-232) there is little description of what the cognitive processes is that underlies learning and transformation, how these processes develop, and how they might be influenced by educational experiences in adulthood. Adult development textbooks, on the other hand, devote little attention to adult education issues and the ways in which adult education can contribute to learning and development in adulthood. Thus, there is a need for a discourse that enables developmentalists, educational psychologists, and adult educators to, first, acknowledges that one another exist and may have something to offer to them; and, second, begin to communicate and collaborate in ways that increase our knowledge of adult development and learning in educational settings. Adult educational psychologists are concerned with improving adult learning, methods of instruction and assessment of adult learning, and promoting development across the life span. Rather than imposing a set of principles or “correct” procedures for analysis and assessment of adult learning and instruction, adult educational psychologists seek to dialogue with adult educators in ways that support what adult educators do, increase psychologists’ knowledge of adult learning, and contribute to advancement of the discipline. Adult educational psychologists recognize that other disciplines and areas of study (e.g., sociology, history, gender studies, and philosophy) are equally important to the well-prepared adult educator as is basic knowledge of psychology and human development. III- Theoretical perspective To survive in today's world, adults must be able to change. Technology has proliferated into every facet of life -- the home, recreation, and the workplace. New technologies have transformed communication systems and work procedures. In the information era, computer-based automation has created the need for profound reskilling. (Zuboff, pp.12-13) As companies downsize, adults are forced to adapt to the changing needs of the workplace. (Froman, pp. 159-170) Workers often have to use new technology, adapt processes to their work's needs, and develop new products. Adult learning and continuing education are of growing importance in our changing society. By its practice and study, practitioners and researchers may help adults adapt to the new demands of a changing world. (Rachel, p.58) Adult education programs are spreading to meet the challenges of shifting technology and world economy, shifting population demographics, shrinking natural resources and the growth in world pollution, increases in multiculturalism and immigration, problems with literacy, mandated education and job-related training, and so forth. This practical concern with adult education has reemphasized what common sense and old wisdom already knew: Relative to children and adolescents, adults learn using different methods (Brookfield, p.34) whereby motivational, affective, and self-develop-mental factors are even more crucial than in younger learners. More so than in childhood and adolescence, cognitive processes and motivation in adult learning have to be driven by affective goals and are more often served by self-mediated, perhaps conscious plans (what we term executive processes). In the current adult education literature, adults are described as more self-directed, self-reflective, and able to change perspectives than are children or adolescents; they are also described as more disposed to bring their own life experience to what they learn and the way they learn. (Brookfield, p.35) Unlike children and adolescents, adults are uniquely capable of “reflecting on the self and the way society defines the self” (Deshler & Hagan, p. 155) Jarvis a long-time proponent of adult learning, contended that “the process of learning is located at the interface of people's biography and the sociocultural milieu in which they live, for it is at this intersection that experiences occur.” (Jarvis, p. 17) More than a decade ago, Cross indicated that in addition to traditional academic goals, the learning goals of adults often emphasize intrinsic knowledge, personal fulfillment (e.g., job or license), community service, religious well-being, social relationships, novelty, acceptance, and cultural knowledge. Given these social and cultural influences on adult-learning activities, attempts to understand adult learning from a sociocultural perspective should be both inviting and informative. (Cross, pp. 152-185) IV- Children to Adult development When we talk about how children learn, we often focus on the developmental stages that children go through as they mature. Adults likewise go through developmental stages which can be grouped chronologically or sociologically (i.e. grouped according to socially defined roles of adults). There is a difference between life-cycle phases and developmental stages. Life-cycle phases are phases which people pass through from birth to death--these phases are not part of a continuous flow toward growth and maturity. Developmental stages are more concerned with personality or ego development. While phases and stages may inform one another, they are not the same thing. One of the famous phase theorists, Levinson's map divides men's into four main eras: Childhood/Adolescence, Early Adulthood, Middle Adulthood, and Late Adulthood. He pays special attention to transitional times between the eras and focuses on the patterns of building, breaking, and rebuilding of men's lives as they age. His map can be imagined as an ascending stairway, and Levinson is quite specific about age groups (i.e. at 20, men enter the adult world, at 35 they settle down, etc.) Kegan's theory can be imagined as an upward spiraling helix, “Beginning stages (Kegan prefers to call them balances, a term that better catches the dynamic nature of development) are characterized by impulsiveness and self-centeredness; these yield to a more other-centered stance, in which interpersonal relationships and mutuality are paramount; this in turn gives way to the birth of a new and more separate self, from which finally evolves an interindividual balance in which the tension between self and other reaches a new synthesis. From this position one is able both to maintain a clear sense of self and yet to merge with others, dissolving and reforming one's separateness when appropriate." (Yates, p. 65) In middle adulthood, with development, the self begins to experience unconscious contradictions between its various systems of collectives or various partial-self systems. Early in youth, these structures were largely experientially based, and specific to social roles, relations, obligations, and requirements in different contexts. However, with the functional regression of the interruption mechanism, and accompanying difficulty to suppress conflicts, frustrations, and contradictions that often emerge in midlife adulthood, this decline in organismic resources and the pressures of external life causes the self to acknowledge its own multiplicity (the different and sometimes incompatible roles it plays across different situations) and may consciously begin to synthesize higher order structures to coordinate these contradictory systems. Working through of this uncertain higher integration gives affective color and content to the well-known midlife life crisis. If this new integration fails, or the person attempts to avoid existential pains by repressing contradictions from consciousness and cultivating instead a false self-identity (the case of a working self dominated by received and marginal systems of the ego), the adaptive intersubjective possibilities and creative self-directed growth of later years may not materialize. Because of this specific kind of dialectical development in adulthood the person (self) becomes more aware of the constructed nature of interpersonal reality. Instead of accepting one's collective structures as simply reflecting out-there facticity the alienation Berger described as dialectical self sees the active role it plays in the "social construction of reality." (Berger & Luckmann, p.50) This dialectical construction of psychosocial reality is not foreign to educators who emphasize the importance in adult learning of perspective transformation that is, cognitive and existential restructuring resulting from new dialectical syntheses. Brookfield has emphasized the importance of critical reflection in adult education, which he added to the importance often ascribed to self-directed learning, the former indeed necessary in order to speak truly of an adult having a degree of self-directedness. Critical reflection involves seeing alterative ways of looking at the world, examining one's own culturally ingrained assumptions, and realizing the contextual embeddedness of one's actions. Whereas Brookfield argued that the teaching of such critical reflection requires the skillful interventions of facilitators, we argue here that such reflection can be precipitated by developmental, organismic-dialectical factors, and then can be further enhanced by educators or mediators. This reflection can be mediated or self-mediated depending on one's developmental experiences. One of Brookfield's criticisms of assumptions made by adult education specialists was that adults are naturally self-directed: that they only require resource persons to facilitate their growth. He countered this with the argument that the role of facilitator needs to be expanded to include the role of an interactive critical thinker who can challenge some of the embedded assumptions of the adults. This can be understood with reference to our account of types of instruction. Adults who have difficulty with adopting critical styles of reflection may not be experiencing the need to process conflicting self-systems yet, or they may be suppressing the conflicts that are becoming revealed by such contradictions. (Brookfield, p.36) V- Knowing, learning and problem solving in adulthood Learning on one's own, being self-directed in one's learning is itself a context in which learning takes place. The key to placing a learning experience within this context is that the learner has the primary responsibility for planning, carrying out, and evaluating his or her own learning. Participation in self-directed learning seems almost universal--in fact, an estimated 90 percent of the population is involved with at least one self-directed learning activity a year…Adults engaging in self-directed learning do not necessarily follow a definite set of steps or linear format. According to Merriam and Caffarella “In essence, self-directed learning occurs both by design and chance depending on the interests, experiences, and actions of individual learners and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Self-directed learning does not necessarily mean learning in isolation--assistance is often sought from friends, experts, and acquaintances in both the planning and execution of the learning activity.” (Merriam and Caffarella, pp. 54-55) Beliefs in the organization and certainty of knowledge are likely to influence comprehension, metacomprehension, and problem solving. Strong believers in simple knowledge, as mentioned earlier, will be able to recall information, perhaps close to verbatim. Yet when the situation requires transfer or application of the information, these individuals are likely to struggle. Conversely, strong believers of complex, interrelated knowledge structure will be able to transfer and apply information. Their recall of facts may be a bit slower because their search will be through a network instead of a list, but recall should be accurate and elaborated with related information. Strong believers in simple and certain knowledge are likely to search for single answers that are written in stone. For example, when presented mathematical problems, they will anticipate one path toward the solution. Furthermore, they will assume that there is no such thing as a gray area. In some areas of mathematics, such as accounting, this may not be a problem. Yet in other areas of mathematics, such as statistics, these individuals will fail to recognize alternative solutions and tentative interpretations of the data. In contrast strong believers of complex and tentative knowledge will search for complex answers and anticipate multiple solutions. This approach to learning encourages flexible and thorough thinking. The belief in the speed of learning is likely to influence adults' anticipated time investment in studying and solving problems. This time investment includes the number of thinking sessions as well as the overall time investment for studying. Strong believers in quick learning may anticipate a brief overall amount of time to be invested in thinking. Hence, a preset cutoff time is expected to be adequate with little consideration of the difficulty of the task at hand. (Smith and Pourchot, pp. 133-134) V1- Role of parents in the development phase I strongly believe that parents play an incredible role in the learning and development of their child be it at the age of adolescence or an adult, parents are always considered to be excellent mentors one can ever have. Psychosocially healthy parents strive to support their children's development, parents of elementary school children are usually, at least tacitly, expected to share the responsibility of education with teachers. Parent contributions to children's academic competence include providing children learning experiences, assisting with homework, and monitoring children's progress. Participation in such activities should provide developmental opportunities for both parents and children. VII- Conclusion Adult educational psychology is primarily concerned with understanding the interrelationship of learning and development and the ways in which learning contributes to adult life-span development. I believe that it is extremely important that the adults of our society should start focusing on their efforts towards learning and development because baby boom generation is coming up with really strong influence on the companies due to their academic qualifications, confidence level, high morale and motivation to work and most importantly learn and be easily moulded as per the norms and cultures of the company. Baby boom generation can be considered a severe threat and the adults should cater to the increasing demands of more technologically acceptable ideas and thoughts. Bibliography Berger P. & Luckmann T. “The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge.” Middlesex, England: Penguin, p. 50, 1966. Brookfield S. D. “Understanding and facilitating adult learning: A comprehensive analysis of principles and effective practices.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 34-36, 1991. Cranton, P. “Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p.3, 1994. Cross, P. “Adults as Learners.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 152-185, 1981. Deshler D., & Hagan N. "Adult educational research: Issues and directions". In S. B. Merriam & P. M. Cunningham (Eds.), Handbook of adult and continuing education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p.155, 1989. Froman L “Adult learning in the workplace” In J. D. 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