Review of Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd Edition)

For the Spring of 2015 IDT 525 course, Instructional Approaches in Learning and Cognition, the required text was Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd Edition) by Sharan B. Merriam, Rosemary S. Caffarella, and Lisa M. Baumgartner.

This text has a little bit of everything in it, as it covers adult learning from many angles and addresses a little bit of a lot of different theories. Unfortunately it lacks focus and order, making it a tough read, and when you combine this with its bloated size (560 pages), this makes it a tough sell. At least it is not terrible expensive for a textbook, coming in at $48 from Amazon.

By trying to cover so much ground in one book, the authors were often unable to provide and context or background for the learning theories, and there is not enough depth for most of the theories so that additional research will need to be done by the reader if they want to learn more than the most basic details. Making matters worse, there is obvious bias to the writing, particularly when it comes to newer approaches to adult learning, including embodied, spiritual, and narrative learning, as well as non-Western learning perspectives.

The nicest thing I can say about this book is that it did lead me to do my own research into pedagogy, so slogging my way through it was not a complete waste of time. I decided to hold onto this book because I was not going to get much money for selling it back, but I certainly would not buy another one if it became lost or damaged.

Thanks for checking in, and next time we will start getting into the courses and books from summer semester of the MSIDT program.

Merriam, S., Caffarella, R. and Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd Edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

MSIDT 525: Instructional Approaches in Learning and Cognition

Hello!

The other course in the second semester of my CSUF MSIDT program (Spring 2015) was MSIDT 525: Instructional Approaches in Learning and Cognition. The university website says that this course “Focuses on behavioral, cognitive, constructivist learning theories, related concepts, and their implications for designing instruction. Develops students’ critical thinking about desirable cognitive outcomes when designing educational experiences.”

The course objectives were (again from the university website):

- The ability to examine learners’ learning preferences and their capacities to organize and coordinate information

- Comparing and contrasting emerging theories of adult learning (andragogy) with theories of how children learn (pedagogy)

- Recognizing the impact of learning theories on the design of learning environments including environments where technology supports learning

The highlight of this class for me was fulfilling the second objective, and to this end I wrote a research paper on Knowles’ andragogy and its application to multimedia learning. This helped me to bridge the gap between theory and application, and components from this paper will be essential in the preparation of my final program thesis and project.

On the fun side of things, I got to work in a small group to author a PowerPoint presentation on learning theory as it applies to online learning. This was probably the most enjoyable group project that I worked on in the program, as the other members were cool people and everybody pulled their weight and respected each other.

And lastly, there were ten discussion forums that the members of Cohort 13 were expected to participate in. These provided a lot of different viewpoints on learning theories and helped to continue building the learning community that was established in the first semester.

Supporting the course was only one main text:

-- Merriam, S., Caffarella, R. and Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood (3rd Edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The readings were difficult ( a review is on its way) and in this course it took a surprising amount of time to do everything right. There were no quizzes or exams, and from the course description it may look like there was not a lot going on, but the paper and discussion boards were very involved and we kept busy throughout the 16 weeks of the course.

Thanks for checking out the blog, and next we will take a look at the text we used for this course.