1. Using adult learning principles to establish a learning climate
Application to Real Settings
Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:
Identify basic tenets of Adult Learning Theory
Give examples of how Adult Learning Theory is applied
to Medical Education
Incorporate the principles into your own instructional situation
Marilla Svinicki
Educational Psychology
UT Austin

2. Today’s possible ideas
Traditional Adult Learning principles
Basic tenets and their relationship to learning
Application to your situation
Other not-so traditional learning theories to consider (if we get there)

3. Interest check
How would you rate your own prior knowledge about traditional adult learning principles?
1 not enough 3 just enough 5 more than enough
Are you more interested in practice or theory?
1 practice both theory

4. Making this more concrete
“I’m not that kind of doctor, so…”
You have to be the expert in your subject matter.
Select a teaching situation to which you would like to apply today’s content.
Ask if it doesn’t seem to fit and we’ll problem solve around it.

5. When adults need to learn:
Imagine that you want to learn a new skill or content area.
Think about what usually triggers that desire to learn.
Think about how you would go about it.
Think about what would help you.
Think about what might get in your way.

6. Traditional adult learning: Andragogy’s 6 principles
Movement from dependency toward increasing self-directedness.
A reservoir of experience that is a rich resource for learning.
Focus on coping with real-life tasks or problems.
Education as a means to develop increased competence.
A need to know the reason to learn something.
The most potent motivators for adult learning are internal, such as self-esteem.
Knowles, et al. 1998

7. What are the implications of adult learning theory, part I?
Adults have:
a lot of prior knowledge to draw on, for both good and bad
(cognitive theory)
more strategies to try and more well-practiced strategies, for both good and bad
(meta-cognitive theory)
What are the implications of these characteristics for the teaching situation you selected earlier?

8. What are the implications of adult learning theory, part II?
Adults are:
more insistent on addressing their own goals than the instructor’s
(motivation theories)
more interested in hands-on, practice-related activities than theory
usually aware of what is possible in terms of learning
(epistemological theory)
more self-aware, for both good and bad
(reflective practitioner theory)
What are the implications of these characteristics for the teaching situation you selected earlier?

9. Some possible concerns
Adult learning theory hasn’t had a solid research basis because of its origins in practice.
Adult learning theory has developed apart from much of the mainstream psychological research on learning and motivation.
Adult learning theory is focused on the individual as the unit of analysis, but doesn’t address the group learning situations that are becoming more common.

10. How do these ideas work for you?
Discussion of participant observations.

11. Some other interesting theories
Cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989)
learning through modeling an expert
Communities of practice (Wenger, 1998)
learning through participation in a community
Case-based reasoning (Kolodner and Guzdial, 2000)
learning through the organization of concrete experiences
Distributed cognition (Salomon, 1995)
the group as the learning unit