An Inservice Project

Key To Icons

	Link to another site
	Pull down a file
	Help!

Adult Learning

The way adults learn impacts their success in the VPI lab.  To design the most effective VPI program possible, you need to possess a basic understanding of how adults learn.  Interest in how people learn is not new.  However, one important fact must always be remembered.  No one type of learning style is better or worse than any other style.  When designing curriculum for your students, remember that adults:

• Tend to prefer courses that focus heavily on the application of knowledge to relevant problems.
• Need to be able to integrate new ideas with what they already know if they are going to keep - and use - the new information.
• Acquire information more slowly if they cannot connect it to something that they know.
• Compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures.
• 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.
• Need concepts to be explained from more than one point of view or more than one life stage.
• Prefer a straightforward how-to approach.
• Need to apply information so that they can better understand the concepts that have been presented.

  

This program was developed by the State of Florida Adult Secondary/GED/VPI Committee of the Practitioners' Task Force, through an Adult Education State Leadership Grant from the Florida Department of Education, Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Education.

Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this web-based training component, it is not an official publication of the Florida Department of Education.