This study explores relationships between experiences in initial education, subsequent life experiences/opportunities and the decision to return to education later in life. Semi-structured interviews with seven female returners to education, focused initially upon the women's perceptions of their aspirations and motivations at various ages, how…

This study analyzed the effect of mathematics courses on a cohort of students at a 4-year university in order to compare the effect of mathematics on adult students, those 25 and older, and traditional-age students. The transcripts of the 118 adult students and the 3,747 traditional-age students who were freshmen in the fall of 1999 were compared.…

This study reports the development and validation of the Graduate Skills and Attributes Scale which was initially administered to a random sample of 272 third-year-level and postgraduate-level, distance-learning higher education students. The data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis. In a second study, the scale was administered to a…

The purpose of this case study was to explore the application and outcome of appreciative inquiry as an online instructional strategy for the development of three specific factors: adult learner motivation, engagement, and performance. Appreciative andragogy was an original phrase developed for this study and is an adaptation of appreciative…

Despite the Mental Health Foundation (2012) stating that each year, one in four people in the United Kingdom (UK) will have some kind of mental health difficulty, students from this group are underrepresented in further education (FE) colleges. In light of this, the purpose of this exploratory research, which was rooted in the phenomenological…

The purpose of this study was to examine connections between student engagement in institutional incentives and student persistence until graduation or program completion. Students ranked their ascribed levels of importance regarding institutional incentives and their satisfaction with the current implementation of those efforts at a technical…

Recertification of certified registered nurse anesthetists has become a concern of both the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) and its membership. Even with the concern, little research has been done on attitudes of the membership and how they perceive the recertification process as it relates to adult learning theories. The purpose…

Since Italy's unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian language at the expense of all other linguistic varieties has dominated language and education policy discourses. Today, as Italy has transformed from a country of mass "emigration" to a country of mass "immigration," the language…

Although a majority of graduate students fall under the definition of adult learners (over age 24 years), many traditional institutions do not offer advising specific to them, nor do they recognize advising needs of these older students in online, classroom, or cohort situations. In this phenomenological study, 9 adult graduate learners were…

Learning a foreign language implies that the learner will become, after a number of years, proficient at expressing ideas, dominating new sounds (phonology), improving the range of words (lexicon), becoming proficient at expressing thoughts in acceptable grammatical form (syntax), and gain sufficient mastery to communicate with negative speakers.…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the subliminal role of interest in preferences for 50 courses available at a community college. This is an idiographic study of educational decisions. It employed a sample of situations and a representative design. Four adults participated in an educational-vocational assessment and in the process of…

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is a framework to help adult English as a second language (ESL) educators renovate their practices into effective, culturally responsive programs, readily accessible to adult learners. Four CRT strategies that can be used include (a) validation through caring, (b) valuing cultural experiences, (c) creating a…

Advancements in technology have brought about new forms of learning and online instruction that allow communication through virtual representations without physically meeting in person. This study builds on previous work involving recursive feedback that tests the hypothesis that an important facet of learning-by-teaching is the opportunity to…

The growth in online education has led to the need for specific strategies that online instructors can use to assist students with the unique challenges of the modality. While many teaching theories can work online, adaptations need to be made to address issues with retention, persistence, and the immediacy that can arise in computer-mediated…

This article investigates the effect of explicit individual corrective feedback (ICF) on L2 pronunciation at the micro-level in order to determine whether ICF needs to complement listening only interventions. To this purpose, the authors carried out a study which investigated the immediate effect of feedback on comprehensibility of controlled…