Education and Life Satisfaction in Seniors

Life Satisfaction Article

   

    I wanted to look at benefits beyond those that a degree can provide in terms of adult education.  Are there reasons to continue to learn besides the monetary incentive that can come from earning a degree.  Is there something inherently good in the expanding of one’s education?

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For the purpose of this study, the effect of participation in online education on the life satisfaction of older adults will be measured.

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    This article goes a bit further ahead in the lives of learners than I have previously looked at.  I wanted an older group of learners so that we can look at the educational benefits without money being a factor at all.  In this study the participants are all past their earning primes and mainly retired.  

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motivation is an essential factor in the learning of older adults. Therefore, material must be presented in a meaningful and relevant way.

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This was in some ways a little bit backwards from what I’d read in previous articles.  Most of what I had read said that adults had a built in sense of motivation.  Perhaps it’s the age of the students in this case, or perhaps it’s a result of the type of education that they are receiving.  It seems reasonable to assume that adults would not pursue education unless they had some sort of internal motivation since it’s not required of them as it is for children or college students.  Still, there is the issue of keeping students engaged and motivated once they’ve started.  If you’re taking a class voluntarily then it’s easy enough to give up at the first sign of difficulty.  This says educators need to be up front in showing the value of the learning and providing an adult learner with a real skill or piece of knowledge.  It relates back to an interview I conducted where the educator I questioned said that he motivates his students by giving them something of value.  A skill they can use, or a bit of knowledge that will aid them in a hobby or on the job.  I think this can also be a sense of accomplishment at having achieved something.  Whatever it is it has to be tangible and it has to be evident in the material.

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However, there is still a misconception that older adults are incapable of learning. To dissolve this stereotype, research revealed that older adults appeared to learn—however differently than younger adults—and that education is a means of improving the intellectual ability of older adults

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    Some of us are worried we don’t learn as quickly as we once did, but it appears that age is not a prohibitor of education.  In fact, this article outlines how continued learning is beneficial for the brain and mental health.  It turns out that you can, and should, teach an old dog new tricks. 

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online education, although in its infancy, has a positive impact on the life satisfaction and successful aging of older adults. (though the data was not conclusive on further scrutiny)

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    I thought this was interesting even if they couldn’t quite hold their data up under strict scrutiny.  I think the concept of older adults gaining greater life satisfaction through new media and technology is a question worth asking.  Much of the internet is dedicated to  information.  We often think of the internet as a vast data well or digital repository of humanities collected knowledge.  One of the biggest uses of theinternet is not actually information collecting per se, but socialization.  It’s so easy to connect with people over the internet now that it can be a great resource for older people who can’t or don’t care to leave the house.  It’s a way to connect with family and with other people their age.  Further more it’s a way to share information on a personal level.  Instead of reading online encyclopedias a person can watch a TED talk, or follow a culinary expert on twitter.  There are so many ways we have access to experts and researchers and brainiacs of all kinds that we didn’t have just a few years ago.  This article also talked about the use of online programs to educate older adults as a positive because there are many things that they simply couldn’t learn because they didn’t exist or they didn’t have the opportunity.  I don’t doubt that online learning for older adults can have a positive effect if they’re willing to take on the adventure.

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One last implication of the research is that older adults are positively impacted by even minimal exposure to online education.

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    This is a cool idea.  Even just a little bit can be a great thing in the lives of adults.  When we talk about education we usually are talking about children and government funding and that kind of stuff… real issues for sure and things that need to be talked about and figured out and given attention/money.  But there is another side of education that deals with nothing but the betterment of a person.  As an adult we can still gain something by being educated.  If nothing else, life satisfaction.  

    This article didn’t get down to specifics quite as much as I was hoping.  I wanted to be shown the ways in which adults gained satisfaction.  What kinds of satisfaction did they experience, how did this improve their lives?  But still this was a glimpse in that direction.  I think more research needs to be done in regard to finding out the inherent benefits of adult education beyond getting a better job and more money.  What I learned mainly from this article and this blog in general is that there is a lot I don’t know or understand about adult education.  Why it’s important (real and concrete reasons rather than the abstract concept of life satisfaction) and how to do it best.  I mainly learned that I still need to learn and that learning is hard.  

The Adult Brain and Learning

Adult Brain Article

           

    I chose this article because I wanted to learn a little bit about the physical components of what makes an adult different from a child in terms of learning.  Some of the science was above my head and they employed some pretty daunting math, but I was able to find some helpful ideas that put adult education in a new context.  The big take away from the article is that adults can learn as effectively as children, but in a different way.

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“The acquisition of new skills in adulthood can positively affect an individual’s quality of life, including their earning potential”

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...learning in adulthood is increasingly a vital part of living in modern society, be it in order to keep pace with ever-advancing technology, to develop new employment prospects or to capitalise on opportunities that were not available to the individual during childhood.

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They first establish that continued education into adulthood has a purpose.  Like previous articles I read this one mentions the monetary reason specifically.  They did go on to say that there are mental health benefits as well and that adults generally reported a higher level of life satisfaction.

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However, the popular view is that adults are less able to learn for an intrinsic reason: their brains are less plastic than in childhood.

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The human brain constantly changes throughout the lifespan and responds differently to environmental challenges and opportunities across that span. Periods during which the brain is most responsive to input from the environment are known as sensitive periods. (not all parts of the brain go through sensitive periods at the same time)

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Based on current understanding, sensitive periods are not a serious limiting factor in adult education, but they do point to changes in the expected rate of learning. (Literacy taught to adults)

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    This was what I was looking for.  Physical reasons why a child and an adult could possibly require different kinds of instruction.  However, it appears from this section of the article that they focus mainly on who learns better generally and not specifically why certain activities/situations would benefit one or the other.  That’s ok.  I think there is some value in understanding that there are times and situations that on the biological level help us learn faster and better.  The periods where certain parts of our brain are more plastic is an incredible concept which with further study could help us to structure learning more effectively.  I was not able to determine if these periods are cyclical or if they are standard ages/times for everyone or if they are sort of random or environmentally affected.  It does indicate that they become less frequent or potent as we get older.  It doesn’t inhibit learning of complex things like literacy but can make it easier to learn if you’re in a period of high plasticity.  

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Methods are now emerging which allow clinicians and researchers to induce plasticity in the adult human brain.

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    So this is a ways away it seems, but this could be a pretty substantial breakthrough in terms of educational techniques/methods/procedures.  If someone can figure out a way to make our brains more receptive to learning then the effects could be astonishing.

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Changes in attention control also influence learning throughout the lifespan. The ability to inhibit distracting stimuli develops over childhood, and children gradually learn to maintain currently relevant goals

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This would be a positive in the way of adult learners.  If we’re able to more effectively control our attention spans as adults it would stand to reason that we’d be able to absorb more information.  This is probably too simple, but it makes sense.  I think the ability to inhibit distracting stimuli is an interesting consideration.  Adult students can more effectively engage with material in a noisy coffee shop or common area on campus where a child would not have the same control of their attention.  

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One particularly relevant aspect of engagement is that social situations induce learning.

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    I don’t have much to add other than I think this rings truer and truer with every class I take in the ITLS program.  I should also admit here that I think I missed an opportunity to have a better experience in this class by not making my materials more readily available.  

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There is some evidence to show that variability in skill acquisition can be predicted prior to the commencement of skill learning and, furthermore, that this variability can be reduced, helping poorer learners to keep up. In the case of literacy acquisition, adult learners have been shown to demonstrate different profiles of strengths and weaknesses which predict their success in literacy programmes

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I’d love to have a test show me if I’ll be able to learn something before I try to learn it.  Or, would that just make me miss out on important failures in my life?  I guess there is something in the try/fail cycle that is important to developing character and humility and patience.  Still, if I could know before I try to learn how small engines work that I’d have absolutely no luck in learning anything about it despite my best efforts then I could have saved some money and a whole bunch of time.  Also, there is something discriminatory feeling about this.  If it’s always accurate then I guess I’d like to be given a shot even if there is no hope for me to learn something.  Of course I don’t think that this is exactly what they’re getting at.  I think they have something more subtle in play here.   Something that will help educators pace their training and at the same time keep everyone on track together.  You can lose students if what they’re learning is too hard, and also if it’s too easy.

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Learning from a live tutor and actively engaging with materials, rather than relying on passive presentation, may be more important for adults than for children.

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    This is hilarious because if I were asked if it’s more important for children or adults to have a live tutor and be actively engaged by materials I think I would have said children!  I think about the articles I’ve read about how online learning is great for adults because they are self motivated, have a highly developed self concept, are too busy to be in class at a certain time/place, are more and better able to maintain concentration, can focus beyond distractions around them and so forth.  All of that would lead me to believe that adults don’t really actually need a live tutor or engagement with materials.  But, if you look at all the information in this article it becomes obvious why this would be important for the adult brain.  It needs more stimulation and preparation and a greater impression to stick.  A kid can sometimes remember the oddest things that you didn’t even know they were listening to.  An adult can have a direct instruction given to them and not remember it the next moment.  This is a generality and isn’t always true, but it illustrates the point that children’s moldable plastic brains are much better at absorbing information without much force behind it where an adult’s brain is generally much less pliable and may need more force to make it’s way into the long-term memory of the learner. 

                        

Information taken from Educating the adult brain: How the neuroscience of learning can inform educational policy by Knowland and Thomas.

Step-By-Step: A Technique

The Step-By-Step Technique

This is taken from an article by Betty McDonald. 

Technique

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“In a step-by-step manner so that the learner has to show understanding of previous information before moving on”

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    This is an interesting approach.  First of all I think of a sort of No Child Left Behind kind of a vibe.  However, reading more about it seems like it’s almost the opposite.  In the SBST you allow learners to set their own pace and move along when they’ve mastered each step.  This is more difficult from a teaching standpoint since your students are on all different phases, but I think there is some merit to doing it this way.  

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“SBST embraces the basic concepts of adult leaming. Knowles (1984) identified five andragogical assumptions of the adult leamer:

                   

1. Self-Concept: As a person matures, he or she moves from dependency to self-directness.

                   

2. Experience: Adults draw on their experiences to aid their learning                           

3. Readiness: The leaming readiness of adults is closely related to the assumption of new social roles.

4.Orientation: As a person learns new knowledge, he or she wants to apply it immediately in problem solving.

5. Motivation: As a person matures, he or she receives motivation to leam from intemal factors.”

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    I was mostly including this so I can write a little bit about these assumptions.  I’ll take them one at a time.  Now these weren’t put in this article to argue about but as underlying assumptions upon which to base their study.  I want to take them in a different light and scrutinize them as assumptions for their own sake separately from the rest of this article.  In terms of analyzing the article I will treat them as safe assumptions.

    1- self concept.  This seems true enough.  However, I’m not sure if it’s completely self evident that all adults will become completely self-directed.  It’s easy to become a person who consistently cuts corners, finds loopholes and weasels out of tough work.  I fight these urges at work and at home all the time.  Maybe I’m extra lazy, but I think it stands to reason that I’m not the only one who may feel this kind of thing even as an adult.  It is probably true that the reasons adults pursue education are different than those of a child or even a young adult.  In this way I suppose you could say that adults are more self-directed than non-adults.  The question of dependency is also interesting as there are many young people who are terrifically self motivated and love learning for no other reason than the joy of it.  These rules pivot on the general however and not the specifics of the aberrations.

2- Experience.  I think this is generally true.  We constantly connect things in our minds, developing relationships between past experiences and knowledge to what we are currently experiencing.  The bigger your reserve of experience the more readily you can connect new learning.  I think this is where adults have the biggest advantage.       

3- Readiness.  This one is a bit baffling to me.  I dont’ know what is meant by saying “new social roles”.  Does this mean that adults slide into different roles easier than younger people?  I could see that being true but also I could see it being more difficult for an adult to become the student if they are used to being the teacher.  This could go both ways.  

4- Orientation.  This seems to related almost directly to the experience assumption.  It’s different enough to include as it’s own assumption, but I think I’ve already said my piece about this.  

5- Motivation.  This one seems related to the first assumption of self-concept.  A person who is voluntarily receiving education stands to reason has a greater amount of internal motivation to succeed than a person who is compelled to learn something.  Again, there are exceptions and it’s not one thing or the other necessarily but it’s probably generally true.
    Over all I think I can buy these assumptions as general guidelines even if they don’t fit every learner in every situation.  The benefit of thinking about these assumptions is that you can then use them to make decisions about how and what to teach.  For example, if we assume that our students are going to be mainly self motivated then we don’t have to focus on grades as much.  Or, if we assume that our students will apply their own experiences to what they are learning we don’t need to provide quite as much context (though it’s probably helpful to still provide some).  It’s a valuable exercise to think about these kinds of assumptions and to play them out in your mind.

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“Step 1 required the leamer to form an equation from each inequality. Step 2 required the leamer to plot all equations on the same graph paper. Step 3 required the leamer to shade the required region.”

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This is how they layered their steps.  I appreciated the simplicity of the experiment.  It made it easy for me to follow and focus on the results of the study rather than trying to figure out what the subjects were doing. It also provided for the group to have some people who could do all three steps almost immediately and some members of the group who had to learn each step at great pains.   

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It worked: “The experimental group's («2 = 19) posttest scores indicate that there was a statistically significant difference between the pre- and posttest scores”

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    I picked this study because it was one that had successful results.  Though, as I read through the results there was still room for some skepticism.  The numbers were not completely trustworthy when analyzed in various ways.  Still, I didn’t read the article to decide whether or not to adopt the step-by-step technique, but rather to read about a technique and how it was developed and/or verified in the experimentation phase.

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There was much that had to do with attitude in terms of student performance.  Not all the students were self motivated.

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    This was an interesting idea since one of the assumptions was that all the students where self-motivated adult learners.  It became an issue here enough that it needed to be addressed.  I don’t fault them for either making the assumption or finding the need to explain that it was not a completely fair assumption to make and that motivation of the students did factor into the results.  It seems inevitable that motivation would be disparate among the students.  Anyone who’s been in or taught a class knows that there are various levels of commitment and motivation.

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“The CI learers reported that their beliefs about leaming changed from conceptualizing it as an impossible subject to one that could be manageable provided that people were willing to embrace innovative methods that promise to assist student learning.”

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    I include this because I think it’s encouraging to know that people can become more amenable to trying to learn something if you have a solid plan or technique.  People sometimes have a hard time believing in their ability to learn and having something that you can show them and they can believe in (something different than what they’ve tried before) is an important concept.  

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“To this end, a class of 35 learners laden with responsibilities, both personal and community and family, comprised the subjects for this present study. As a foreigner in a new culture, I was personally challenged to make a difference in the learners' lives of in a number of areas. As mentioned earlier, this present article seeks to explain the findings from work with the learners and provide teachers with a tried-and-tested, hands-on guide to presenting difficult-to- grasp mathematical concepts to learners.”

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I just liked the tone and sentiment of this conclusionary paragraph.  It’s worth exploring best practices and new methods and techniques.  There are some that may work best in some situations and others that will work better in other situations and having a varied and expansive toolbox will give me a better base for designing and executing instruction.             

       

Adult Ed Degree Programs

Degree Programs

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“Although degree attainment rates in the United States have been relatively stagnant over the past decade, nearly every other industrialized nation has seen drastic increases in the number of adults holding college degrees”

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This comes from the NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION online periodical.  This chapter, written by Angela Gast, was interesting in the way it explained what I already felt about adult and continuing education.  That it is a complicated choice for people, but has some real value if you do decide to continue your education (which I am doing myself)

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“This chapter examines current trends in adult degree programs and services that aim to increase degree completion rates among adult students, with a specific focus on public research institutions, where, unlike many community colleges and for-profit institutions, adult education sometimes is located on the periphery of the institution’s mission.”

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    I include this to give the scope of what they’re trying to do and also because the last line about adult education being moved to the periphery I feel is true in several ways.  First, there is less pressure for an adult with an established career to continue their education as there is for a young person (high school or early 20’s).  This makes sense because this group of people are those who typically do go on to get higher education.  I’m not arguing that this is in any way wrong or bad.  It’s great and I’m all for the young people of the world becoming educated.  What I think is wrong and bad is how we feel like when we finally graduate with that bachelors, or masters or even PhD that we’re done forever.  I agree it become much more difficult to pursue an education full time once you have a career and a family etc but I don’t think it’s impossible and I certainly don’t think it’s a waste of time/money/energy.  There are some real benefits!

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“Time and finances are cited as the most common barriers faced by adult students.”

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“Prospective adult students are dissuaded by tuition costs and time constraints. And while online degree programs partially address these problems, they do not always offer enough of a perceived value to attract this potential adult student market.”

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    Exactly!  Time and finances are very hard to figure out if you’re going to pursue a college degree.  Even the online thing, which is what I’ve chosen is time consuming and expensive.  Why then are adults persuaded to continue their educations?  I think there is a large incentive to go back to school if you think you could make more money by changing professions.  Perhaps there is an element of looking for greater job satisfaction as well.  These are both factors for me (I know, I know… I’m going INTO education to try to make more money?  What am I nuts?)  I think though that there are other benefits from continuing your educational pursuits.  I’ll discuss this more in a later post about life satisfaction and older adult education.  For now, suffice it to say that education need not all be done at a university or college.  

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“Public research universities that seek to increase adult student access must evaluate the effectiveness of their services for older students. Adults lead busy lives and are not always able to seek help during normal business hours; nor are they always comfortable with seeking support services online. Tailoring services to accommodate the unique needs of adult students through both online and in-person experiences will enable universities to better support and retain students through to graduation.”

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    I thought it was an interesting puzzle they described in terms of facilitating education for adults who have more life experience and whose brains work in different ways.  There are more distractions to adult students, but also a higher level of self-motivation.  If schools can tailor education toward adults and the situations they face in trying to jam some book learning into their already hectic lives it can be beneficial for both the school and the student.  One aspect of having older adult students in class with younger more traditionally aged students in the college or university settings is that these older people bring a very different and often times enriching perspective to class.  I remember fondly as an undergrad having some older adults in my classes from time to time.  They were wonderful students and I loved hearing what we learned filtered through their experiences.  It put context around the concepts and connected ideas in ways that I simply didn’t have the capacity or life experience to do for myself.  

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“Once these benchmarks have been established, the effectiveness of adult degree completion initiatives can be assessed more accurately. This assessment also will give the institution an opportunity to identify gaps in services and develop enhanced programming to recruit and retain adult learners.”

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This was written in the context of not having enough information or research about adult programs in the higher-educational setting.  I included it because I found it interesting that it’s hard to know what we don’t know.  We have all sorts of ideas and concepts and philosophies and data to study.  We can create best practices and search text upon text upon study upon study and still there are wide gaps in our knowledge.  Even the knowledge we firmly have engraved in our minds can have gaping chasms in them.  One of the questions I’ve been pondering this semester in terms of adult education is how does it differ from the education a child receives.  I’m interested in concrete methodological and detail-oriented procedural answers here.  What would I do as a teacher different if I were teaching a class of 5th graders as opposed to a class of  40 something MBA students.  What specifically would I do for each group?  Would there be overlap?  I’m not talking content obviously, but in my approach.  Would I do group projects, writing assignments, surprise quizzes or whatever with one group but not the other?  I think maybe the answer is no!  I think maybe the tone and scale of the class might change but maybe the procedure of the classes might be very similar.  I’m still wrestling with this idea, but I’m glad that I’m not the only one with gaps in my conceptualization and methodological approach to adult education.