"Adult education, distinct from child education, is a practice in which adults engage in systematic and sustained self-educating activities in order to gain new forms of knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values."
The factors that motivate adults to learn, and strategies to keep them engaged during the learning process.
Understanding motivation: A study of various theories and models of motivation to understand the basic principles and concepts.
Intrinsic motivation: This topic deals with internal factors that influence a person's motivation such as values, beliefs, and interests.
Extrinsic motivation: This topic deals with the external factors that affect a person's motivation, such as rewards, punishments, and feedback.
Self-efficacy: This topic deals with a person's belief in their ability to succeed in a particular task, which significantly affects motivation.
Goal setting: This topic explores setting measurable and attainable goals to keep individuals motivated and engaged.
Feedback and reinforcement: This topic dives into the role of feedback and reinforcement in motivating individuals to achieve their goals.
Attribution theory: This topic examines how individuals interpret their successes and failures, which has a great impact on their motivation.
Expectation theory: This topic deals with how an individual's expectations about the outcome of a task influence their level of motivation.
Personal values and beliefs: This topic explores how a person's values and beliefs influence their motivation and engagement.
Needs theory: This topic looks into how individual needs such as safety, social belonging, and self-actualization, impact motivation.
Behavioral engagement: This topic examines how active participation and involvement in learning activities lead to higher motivation.
Social learning theory: This topic explores how learning is influenced by social interactions, observation, and modeling.
Self-determination theory: This topic examines how individuals' sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness promote motivation and engagement.
Interest and curiosity: This topic explores how the level of interest and curiosity about a topic impacts motivation and learning.
Emotion and motivation: This topic looks into how positive and negative emotions affect motivation and engagement.
Motivation and learning style: This topic examines how different learning styles impact motivation and engagement.
Motivation and technology: This topic explores the role of technology in motivating and engaging learners.
Cultural factors: This topic looks into how cultural factors such as values, beliefs, and expectations impact motivation and engagement.
Assessment and evaluation: This topic examines how assessment and evaluation can be used to motivate and engage learners.
The role of the teacher: This topic explores the role of the teacher in motivating and engaging learners and creating a positive learning environment.
Intrinsic motivation: This refers to the internal drive or desire of an individual to learn, grow and achieve their goals. It is self-motivated and driven by the individual's own interests, curiosity or sense of accomplishment.
Extrinsic motivation: This involves motivation that derives from external factors such as rewards, grades, or external recognition.
Social motivation: This type of motivation is derived from social influences, such as positive reinforcement from peers, feedback or interaction with others in the learning context.
Mastery orientation: Students with a mastery orientation to their learning are driven by the internal desire to develop their knowledge and skills.. They focus primarily on self-improvement and performing better than their previous performances.
Performance orientation: Those with a performance orientation strive for high grades or test scores to outperform their peers and achieve a high rank. They often focus on gaining external validation and demonstrate their proficiency in comparison to others.
Goal-oriented motivation: This involves a specific end or target that learners aspire to attain through their learning efforts.
Incentive motivation: Incentive motivation is a type of extrinsic motivation that involves the use of rewards or incentives to encourage learning or spur students toward getting higher grades.
Emotionally responsive engagement: Notably, this includes learners' emotional responses to the learning material, and how engaged or absorbed they are in the educational task.
Behavioral engagement: This encompasses the actual behaviors that learners exhibit while engaging with the learning content.
Cognitive engagement: Refers to how much learners are actively processing or reflecting on the material they are learning. It can be measured by components such as analyzing, summarizing, or connecting new knowledge with existing schema.
"It can mean any form of learning adults engage in beyond traditional schooling, encompassing basic literacy to personal fulfillment as a lifelong learner, and to ensure the fulfillment of an individual."
"...adult education reflects a specific philosophy about learning and teaching based on the assumption that adults can and want to learn, that they are able and willing to take responsibility for the learning, and that the learning itself should respond to their needs."
"Driven by what one needs or wants to learn, the available opportunities, and the manner in which one learns, adult learning is affected by demographics, globalization and technology."
"The oldest man to enroll in primary school in Kenya is one Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge who was an 84-year-old from Kariobangi Nairobi."
"Adult learning can be in any of the three contexts, i.e.: - Formal – Structured learning that typically takes place in an education or training institution, usually with a set curriculum and carries credentials. - Non-formal – Learning that is organized by educational institutions but non-credential. Non-formal learning opportunities may be provided in the workplace and through the activities of civil society organizations and groups. - Informal education – Learning that goes on all the time, resulting from daily life activities related to work, family, community or leisure (e.g. community baking class)."
"The World Bank's 2019 World Development Report on The Changing Nature of Work argues that adult learning is an important channel to help readjust workers' skills to fit in the future of work and suggests ways to improve its effectiveness."