THE AGING ADULT LEARNER: A TRULY NEGLECTED SPECIES

This paper will examine the impact of and need for educational opportunities among adult U.S. citizens. To assess quality of life across 15 different dimensions, 3‐ to 4‐hour interviews were conducted with nationally representative samples of 30‐, 50‐, and 70‐year‐olds. Ratings on importance indicated that learning was of decreasing importance to older groups. However, a large proportion of all age groups reported that their needs were not being well met in learning. Correlations of ratings on needs met with ratings on overall quality of life, weighted by importance ratings, revealed that learning related substantially to overall quality of life. Analyses of the educational needs of these cohorts identified adult education programs needed to improve quality of life.

This paper is adapted from a presentation given at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society, San Francisco, 1977.

Support for this project was provided by a grant from the National Institute of Education (Grant NIE‐G‐00‐3‐0148) for the interviews with the 30‐year‐olds and a grant from the Administration on Aging (Grant 90‐A‐514) for the interviews with the 50‐ and 70‐year‐olds.     

The determinants of undergraduate degree performance: How important is gender?

This study uses data drawn from three recent cohorts of undergraduates at the University of Sussex to investigate the key determinants of degree performance. The primary theme of the study is an examination of the gender dimension to degree performance. The average ‘good’ degree rate for female students was found to be superior to the male rate. The modest raw gender differential in first class degree rates favoured women but was found to be attributable to their better endowments, particularly pre-entry qualifications. The largest differential favouring women was in the II:i classification, where almost all of the difference was attributable to differentials in coefficient treatment rather than endowments (or characteristics). The analysis undertaken also allowed the investigation of a number of sub-themes relating to the effects on degree performance of, inter alia, pre-entry qualifications, ethnicity, socio-economic background and health disability. The largest effects were reserved for the role of pre-entry qualifications with more modest effects detected for ethnicity and socio-economic background.     

Introducing Risk Management Techniques Within Project Based Software Engineering Courses

In 1996, USC switched its core two-semester software engineering course from a hypothetical-project, homework-and-exam course based on the Bloom taxonomy of educational objectives (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). The revised course is a real-client team-project course based on the CRESST model of learning objectives (content understanding, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and self-regulation). We used the CRESST cognitive demands analysis to determine the necessary student skills required for software risk management and the other major project activities, and have been refining the approach over the last 5 years of experience, including revised versions for one-semester undergraduate and graduate project course at Columbia. This paper summarizes our experiences in evolving the risk management aspects of the project course. These have helped us mature more general techniques such as risk-driven specifications, domain-specific simplifier and complicator lists, and the schedule as an independent variable (SAIV) process model. The largely positive results in terms of review of pass / fail rates, client evaluations, product adoption rates, and hiring manager feedback are summarized as well.     

Training physical education students to self-regulate during basketball free throw practice

The additive effects of self-regulation training in forethought, performance, and self-reflection phase processes on acquiring a novel motoric skill (i.e., basketball free throws) and self-reflective beliefs were studied with 50 college students. The results showed a positive linear trend between the number of self-regulatory phases, in which the participants were trained, and their free throw shooting performance and shooting adaptation. The two- and three-phase training groups displayed significantly more accurate free throws and were able to self-correct their shooting form more frequently following missed shots than all other groups. Participants who received three-phase training displayed the most adaptive motivational profile, characterized by making strategic attributions and adaptive inferences and by using self/process criteria during self-evaluations.