Learning preference and motivation among adult returning students to higher education: A comparison to traditionally-aged students.

Abstract

A common assumption girds the writing and research on adult returning students to higher education: that these adults vary in significant ways from traditionally aged students. Initially this difference was seen, for example, in adults' purported greater need to see the utility in what they learned and in their supposed preference for active learning. More recently, the learner personalities of adults have been portrayed as growing increasingly diverse with age, contrasting with supposedly less diverse younger students. This dissertation approaches the problem of adult student difference through exploratory research. First, five specific frameworks for the interpretation of findings are presented regarding how adult learning development might be discovered. Secondly, a pilot investigation sets the stage for the research of possible difference in the areas of learning preference and motivation. Finally, four hundred and twenty randomly selected university students representing three age cohorts--18 to 24, 25 to 44 and 45 and older, were surveyed. Contrary to expectation, learning preference and motivation cluster dimensions using ICLUST procedures (Kulik and Kulik, 1972) are similar across the three cohorts of students studied and dimension scale scores vary little by age (or sex). Only when "best characteristic" statements were examined to determine dimension predominance were more meaningful differences discovered. The findings suggest that we must recognize the similarity of students across age boundaries before we begin to ascribe difference. This interpretation also applies to a described proto-theory of student motivation. Internal learning motivation is shown to be comprised of two clusters which co-exist as equally important motivations at all studied ages: the first cluster is that of externally defined but internalized rewards, while the second, self-defined goals, is what Deci and Ryan (1985) referred to as "rewards ... inherent in the activity" of learning. In fact, on the "best characteristic" level of dimension predominance, the learning preferences and motivations of the oldest adult returning students may best embody those we which in students of any age. The concluding implication is thus that age may be a less significant indicator of student difference than previously suspected.