Learning Science for Adult Learners
What picture comes to mind with the word study?
Many of you may picture a young person sitting in a well-lit room, punching away at their keyboard or laying ink down on a notebook with a heavy textbook opened beside. While it is a typical setting for a traditional student, our students often study in much different settings. Some of them may try to memorize vocabularies in a workplace where their colleagues may call on them any minute; some of them may be looking at video lectures with no sounds so it won’t disturb their sleeping baby; some of them may put on their earbuds to try and listen to a lecture recording on their way to work. In many circumstances, our students are juxtaposing their studies with other responsibilities in life. They are not traditional students after all; they are adult learners. This article is going to explore the learning science used to assist our learners in their studies.
Why Know Our Learners
It is important to know our learners well. Their life styles and studying habit provide information that critical to a effective learning experience. For example, since our learners intersperse their studying time, we are considering modules in their study curriculum that tailor to short period studying. As opposed to the rigorous schedule requirement that follows formal learning, our students need a more flexible schedule. This kind of information drives our design and central mission that focuses on educational content that are aligned on every learning step, motivating to keep learners engaged, and tailored to short learning sessions.
The Goals of Exploring Learning Science
It is important to lay the ground and talk about why we are applying learning science to our design in the first place. Literature theories and research results help us create learning framework that can be generalized into multiple curriculum. In other words, instead of drilling down to create the best program that teaches X subject, our ultimate design should be able to apply to any subject.
Following principles that allow knowledge to efficiently transfer while maintaining cognitive engagement allows our designers to rapidly create structures that can later be adapted into different subject domains.
Some Questions to Answer
To create the general learning learning framework for adult learners, we need to answer these fundamental questions about learning:
- How do we help adult students learn more efficiently?
- What would motivate adult learners to read one more chapter or to work on one more practice question?
- How to fit a rigorous curriculum into adults’ busy schedules?
Fortunately, we can look to useful learning theories that caters to adult learners to get us better equipped at answering these questions.
Instructional Theories and Research
Backwards Design
The first learning design practice that we are adopting are not specific to the adult learning process; yet, it is still the backbone of our design philosophy. Backwards design, to put simply, is a results-focused design structure of learning. We can compare it to travel planning. A good planner plans on the desired cultural experience that each site visit aims to achieve rather than systematically checking off a list of “must-visits.” In essence, backwards design focuses on placing instructional content, activities, and assessments in strategic locations in a course so that tourists, or students, can take away the maximum desired result — be it joy or understanding.
This design methodology serves our learners on multiple fronts. Backwards design ensures adult learners do not waste time on repetitive practices that are less fruitful in achieving their learning goals. Given a worthy task to accomplish, backwards design focuses solely on equipping learners in the most efficient way. Every instruction is aligned to an explicit learning goal. In other words, adult learners do not have to waste their time in completing learning tasks that do not appear in assessments, and that ultimately do not help in attaining their degree. Moreover, when we can carefully articulate the priorities of our instructions, students can see the purpose of their day-to-day studies, thus increasing their motivation and engagement in the course. This correlation may not be obvious to instructions or curriculum designers, but, according to Understanding by Design, are “easier for students to feel.”
Deliberate Practice
When we set out to help adult learners understand more than they already know, deliberate practice is the workhorse concept that will drive home the result. We characterize deliberate practice, differently from regular practice, as a highly focused effort to develop one’s skill and knowledge. This distinction corrects the common problem with repeated practice — an improvement plateau as more time is spent on developing the same skill. When adult learners are able to improve at a relatively constant pace, they would need to spend less time performing educational tasks, therefore leaving more time for them to take care of other responsibilities, all the while achieving greater learning results.
The key pillars to designing deliberate practice that helps us avoid the practice plateau are chunking, immediate feedback, and rest.
Chunking, or sectioning instructional materials into chunks, helps learners better focus their practices on specific knowledge or skills. When learners have a clearer sense of purpose in their practice, their skill ceiling improves, and extends the reach of their improvements.
Getting feedback immediately after each practice is also crucial. Since adult learners are sometimes constrained by their learning time, knowing their performance of their studied tasks can lead to greater reassurance of their accomplishment or a clearer direction to improve for their next practice opportunities.
Since deliberate practice is exhaustive given the mental and physical requirements depending on the nature of practice, rest is important to keeping learners focused in the long run. With practices that enforces our learners to take a break and engage their minds in some other activities, we can better fit learning into their daily lives. When learners adopt the habit of intermittent practices, they are less likely to alienate studying activities and more likely to view as any other daily responsibilities.
Nudge
Nudge, while a behavioral economics concept and not a learning science one intrinsically, can still be a crucial element in further motivating adult learners in their studies. We define nudge as positive reinforcements and indirect suggestions that influence one’s decision-making and behavior. Sometimes viewed as opposite to education, which is more direct in the transformation of behavior and thinking, nudge helps adult learners who are unable to commit to dedicated studying times.
Similar to training and exercising, learning takes certain level of mental solidarity to persist over the long run. Some adult learners may even be opposed to learning, thinking their time to learn has passed since the day they first left school. Embedding elements in our design that nudge learners into studying is a way to help prevent such mentality from affecting student performance over time.
Many e-learning companies, in their discussion with us during research, indicated that they have given top priorities in developing nudging elements in their curriculum. The predominant concern these companies have is the fact that many students do not engage in the instructional activities that facilitates their learning. Their hope with employing nudge elements is that they will help students take the first step. While adult learners are comparatively more motivated than traditional students, nudge still proves to be an indispensable piece of curriculum design if we want to engage learners on the surface and psychological level.
Applying Science into Practice
Hopefully you have a better grasp on answering the quick assessment questions raised earlier. Yet, even though we have a better understanding of methods that could improve adult learning, there are still some concerns that can not be ignored.
After we have a general framework that can be used as the backbone of any curriculum for adult learners, we recognize that applying these into practice cares for much learner testing and calibration. Every instructional content has special needs, similar to every adult learners calls for different studying time and situation that suits their lifestyles; our instructional design can not be simply based on the theoretical level.
We aim to conduct usability tests and interviews to solicit important feedback that will provide the appropriate fine-tuning needed to produce the learning experience catered to our specific learner demography.
You can find out more on our post about design.
References
- Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design.
- Schwartz, D. L., Tsang, J. M., & Blair, K. P. (2016). The ABCs of how we learn: 26 scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them. W W Norton & Co.
- Thaler, Richard H.,Sunstein, Cass R. (2008) Nudge :improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness New Haven : Yale University Press,
