30 Things We Know For Sure
About Adult Learning

By Ron and Susan Zemke

Things We Know About Adult Learners and Their Motivation

  1. Adults seek out learning experiences in order to cope with specific life-changing events such as marriage, divorce, a new job, a promotion, being fired, retiring, losing a loved one or moving to a new city.
  2. The more life-changing events an adult encounters, the more likely he or she is to seek out learning opportunities.
  3. The learning experiences adults seek out on their own are directly related – at least in their own perception – to the life-changing events that triggered the seeking.
  4. Adults are generally willing to engage in learning experiences before, after, or even during the actual life-changing event.
  5. Adults who are motivated to seek out a learning experience do so primarily because they have a use for the knowledge or skill being sought. Learning is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
  6. Increasing or maintaining one's sense of self-esteem and pleasure are strong secondary motivators for engaging in learning experiences.

Things We Know About Designing Curriculum for Adults

  1. Adult learners tend to be less interested in, and enthralled by, survey courses. They tend to prefer single-concept, single-theory courses that focus heavily on the application of the concept to relevant problems.
  2. Adults need to be able to integrate new ideas with what they already know if they are going to keep - and use - the information.
  3. Information that conflicts sharply with what is already held to be true, and thus forces a re-evaluation of the old material, is integrated more slowly.
  4. Information that has little "conceptual overlap" with what is already known is acquired slowly.
  5. Fast-paced, complex or unusual learning tasks interfere with the learning of the concepts or data they are intended to teach or illustrate.
  6. Adults tend to compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures.
  7. Adults tend to take errors personally, and are more likely to let them affect self-esteem. Therefore, they tend to apply tried-and-true solutions and take fewer risks.
  8. The teacher must know whether the concepts and ideas will be in concert with or in conflict with the learner and his/her values.
  9. Programs need to be designed to accept viewpoints from people in different life stages and with different value "sets."
  10. A concept needs to be "anchored" or explained from more than one value set and appeal to more than one developmental life stage.
  11. Adults prefer self-directed and self-designed learning projects over group-learning experiences led by a professional.
  12. Non-human media such as books, programmed instruction and television have become popular in recent years.