For Educators

• Articles
• Events
• Links

NEW!! The 6th Edition of The Adult Student's Guide Now Available!

We now have our Instructor's Manual: Teaching College Success to Adult Learners online.

Welcome to Adult Student.com! Our site is a companion to The Adult Student's Guide to Survival & Success, 6th edition, by Al Siebert and Mary Karr. The ASG is an introductory book to college focusing on the unique challenges faced by the older-than-average college student.

Use AdultStudent.com as your resource for retention of your adult college students.

New! Spring 2009 Adult Student Connect! - A forum for Adult Students and Educators to help each other out. Be in on the ground floor and help us build the site!

Articles:

• Teaching Adult Students the Way They Learn: The Instructor's Role in Retaining Adult Learners and Increasing Their Chances of Success in College (Presented at the National Conference on the Adult Learner in Atlanta, Georgia, May 2000.) Teaching adult learners requires more advanced teaching skills than teaching traditional students. This interactive session will focus on ways for classroom instructors to help adult learners overcome their fears, handle the transition into college, develop support groups, and be less likely to drop out.

• From Job Descriptions to Professionalism Lean, customer driven, agile corporations are having difficulties finding qualified employees. The school systems are not graduating students prepared for employment in excellent, constantly changing corporations.

• Preparing Adult Learners to be Resilient in a World of Non-Stop Change (Presented at the National Conference on the Adult Learner in Atlanta, Georgia, May 2000.) The people best suited for today's world of non-stop change are different from those who were raised to fit into an unchanging world. To survive and thrive in constantly changing work environments, people in every occupation must be adaptable, highly resilient, and change-proficient.

• Adult Students Need Resilient, Emotionally Intelligent Colleges The colleges most effective at attracting, retaining, and graduating adult students are those that are highly resilient and demonstrate excellent emotional intelligence with adult students.

• Making Accommodations for Students with Learning Disabilities in College Classrooms The purpose of this presentation is to show how proper accommodations in college classrooms can lead to more students with learning disabilities being successful in more courses.

• Quest for the Grail? Searching for Critical Thinking in Adult Education The concept of critical thinking is explored from the perspective of an adult education graduate student. The paper argues that critical thinking, as presently constituted, lacks both clarity and depth. These problems need to be addressed before critical thinking can become viable and useful.

• Relationship of Optimism/Pessimism, Vulnerability to Stress and Academic Achievement of College Students The present research is about the incredible power of mind on body. The aim of the study was to find out the effect of an individual's thinking style such as optimism/pessimism on his/her vulnerability to physical and psychological stress. The study also explored the relationship of academic achievement with the variables of the study.

• Strategies for Active Learning Active learning has been defined as providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject. Read some strategies here.

• Personality Traits and Learning Styles For Divergent Learners A study was conducted to examine the relationship between specific personality traits and learning styles and academic achievement in gifted students to determine whether or not these factors resulted in their becoming "at-risk" in the educational system because of their divergence.

• Between Dread and Assurance: Autobiography and Academic Conventions in the Writing of Adult Learners The presentation described methods used in her Autobiographical Writing course that have succeeded in increasing the confidence of adult learners, methods that establish a foundation for achievement in writing.

• The Adult Learner in Academic Mid-Life Retention of adult learners in the distance doctoral, teaching and learning environment is an issue of concern to faculty and administrators alike. It is the students in academic mid-life who are of particular concern in this presentation.

External Articles:

• National Academies Press: Being Fluent with Information Technology Executive Summary article:
  "There have been impressive claims for the potential benefits of information technology, and many would like to realize those benefits."

• New Link! from the ASTD Learning Circuits website: Surprise! Be Prepared For Anything in a Synchronous Environment article by Jennifer Hofman:
  "As more organizations adopt the tools, the synchronous medium will bring many changes to traditional instruction. Managing classes that include learners from different cultures, languages, and time zones will start to become second nature to instructors. Just as many people cannot imagine life before ATM machines, our global community will marvel that we taught in such restricted silos."

Additional Educator Resources at the AdultStudent.com Bookstore