The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of feedback that English as a Second Language (ESL) students received on their writings either from an automated essay scoring (AES) system or from the teacher. The participants were 12 adult ESL students who were attending an intensive English center at a university in Florida. The drafts of the…

This paper will address how the digital divide affects distance education. Lack of access for some students does raise concerns. Access to technology is often defined by what students don't have: what is called a digital divide. Access also is defined by the speed of Internet connections. Access in the future will be even greater as more computers…

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17-55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities…

To promote the academic success of and to retain adult students of color, the Academic Services Unit at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), an urban Catholic university, in Detroit Michigan, has designed and implemented the Professional Mentor Program Plus, funded by the State of Michigan's King-Chavez-Parks (KCP) higher education initiative,…

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of adult participation in part-time education and training throughout the 90s and into the 2000s using data from 14 waves (1992-2005) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). We study the volume (stocks) of participation and non-participation and the gross flows between states. This analysis provides a…

We investigated whether adult learners' knowledge of phonotactic restrictions on word forms from their first language impacts their ability to use statistical information to segment words in a novel language. Adults were exposed to a speech stream where English phonotactics and phoneme co-occurrence information conflicted. A control where these…

When John McAnuff came to London from Jamaica in 1958 he was not planning to stay. Like most of the people who made the crossing to England, frustrated by low pay, little opportunity and poor living conditions, he intended to work hard for a few years before returning home a bit richer. McAnuff, now 72, worked for 10 years as a passenger guard on…

The recognition of prior learning (RPL) has been a part of adult education policy and practice for a long time, but in different ways and in different times and places. In Sweden, RPL has been an explicit part of the policy since 1996. This policy analysis starts with the current Swedish policy concerning RPL. The figures of thought expressed in…

Adult basic education represents a marginalized field that addresses the needs of a largely marginalized population: adults who are viewed through a deficit lens labeling them as being underprepared. This article examines particular challenges and strengths of adult learners in basic education programs (including literacy, English language, and…

The link between learning and the knowledge-economy is so crucial that the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development has reconceptualised the term knowledge-economy to call it "learning economy". Ultimately, one of the main challenges of learning and development in the 21st century is to evaluate the significant learning…

Unaware of the messages a bare adult learning environment sends and its effect on adult learners, a trainer attends an intensive Reggio Emilia course and learns that the physical environment is the "third teacher"--for adults as well as for children. Using principles of Reggio, she offers suggestions for enhancing adult learning spaces and…

The aging population is a worldwide challenge. Understanding how older adults have been portrayed would provide a foundation on which future scholarship can build. This study assesses and critiques the assumptions underlying the portrayal of older adults and their learning in adult education journals from 1980 to 2006. On reviewing 93 articles in…

In a serial recall task, the "Hebb repetition effect" occurs when recall performance improves for a sequence repeated throughout the experimental session. This phenomenon has been replicated many times. Nevertheless, such cumulative learning seldom leads to perfect recall of the whole sequence, and errors persist. Here the authors report…

The Commission on International Adult Education (CIAE) of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) provides a forum for the discussion of international issues related to adult education in general, as well as adult education in various countries around the globe. The following purposes summarize the work of the…

This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…