How Adults Think and Learn Flashcards
How Adults Think and Learn
Adults do not function and learn in the same ways that children do, so we must examine our assumption about how to support, nurture, and enhance growth and learning in adults.
Understanding learning
As Mentkowski and associates (2000) put it, understanding learning, understanding the learner, and envisioning the learner as a mature, motivated, and self-directed person will help create learning that lasts in the post graduate environment.
representing the interraction or relationship between learber and teacher
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Individual development in adulthood
Early adulthood is concerned with” entering the adult world” and building a life structure that includes both work and intimate or family life.
Continued: Individual development in adulthood
Midlife- this may be the point at which a person decides to change careers so one that seems more rewarding or meaningful or the time when a woman who is largely engage in child rearing re-enters school to prepare to enter or re-enter the workforce
Continued: Individual development in adulthood
Levinson speaks of normative disequilibrium, during which people are negotiating changes in life, eras and stages within them.
At such times, people may be psychologically fragile, but may also have the potential for rapid growth and change
Continued: Individual development in adulthood
Cultural and social context, also affect all development, including adult development
Adult thinking, and learning
Procedural knowledge-one of its important features is evaluating how a given piece of knowledge was derived.
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Merdinger (1991) pointed out that for women and others from non-dominant groups in the society, the simple, but profound act of finding “ voice,” of developing confidence in the value of one’s own perception and experiences in a situation of being able to describe those perceptions to others, must be a goal of learning.
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Traditional reflective techniques, often used in the classroom and the field, such as keeping a journal and process recording, require students to record their personal observations, perceptions and subjective reactions to the practice encounters, readings, or classroom events
Critical thinking
Critical thinking, is that mode of thinking- about any subject, Content, or problem- in which the thinker improve the quality of his, or her, thinking by skillfully, taking charge of the structures, inherent and thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them.
Learning styles
Kolb (1984) devise a system for thinking about styles of learning that has been used in social work.
It contains four ways of interacting with the world through active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualization.
Continued: learning styles
Determine the learning style with which an individual is most comfortable
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Assimilative learners, prefer reasoning, theoretical, models, explanations, and working with ideas, concerts, and practice
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Convergent learners Prefer, problem-solving, decision, making models, the practical application of ideas, and technical or school these tasks.
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Accommodation learners prefer doing an acting, caring out, plans, fitting theory, to facts, and relying on other people for information
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Divergent learners gravitate towards inductive reasoning (generating concepts from observations), generating, alternative ideas, and implications, and using brainstorming and imagination in their work (Davis, 1993)
Transformational learning
The highest levels of conceptual development are considered to be rare, even in middle adulthood (Davis,1993)
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Transformational learning occurs when an individual has a Reflected on assumptions and expectations about what will occur, has found these assumptions to be faulty, and has revise them.., it has the potential to lead to transformed meaning perspectives, or changed ways of seeing (Cranton,1996)
The reflective practitioner
Schon’s theory offers the idea of “ reflection-in-action” to capture how all professions must deal not just with thinking, but also with taking action.
His theory rejects technocratic views, a professional functioning
Understanding how learning informs teaching
Reynolds (1942/1985) model of learning, and the others discussed have the following implications for teaching:
-start where the learner
-Engage the student in the learning process
-Be patient with the learning process
-At the same time have high expectations of everyone
