The Emotional Learner

We all have different experiences of formal education and often these experiences shape our future expectations.

My formal education was chaotic; six primary schools in three different countries followed by three secondary schools. My final year of schooling was perhaps the worst of all, having started yet another new school that didn’t offer some of the subject options of the previous one. I muddled through to the end of the year, sat my final exams and failed all but one.

A couple of years of drifting from one dead-end job to another, I enrolled on a course at my local Further Eduction college, and I’ve been studying or teaching ever since.

College was followed by several years of study with the Open University while working full-time as a junior civil servant, after which I left my job to complete a full-time PGCE teaching qualification, returning to the Open University some time later to study for Masters Degree.

I taught in secondary education for nearly fifteen years, but also designed and delivered a short introductory psychology course at a local adult learning centre. Somewhere in-between all this I spent a few years engaged in post-graduate research in psychology and education.

I suspect my early educational experiences shaped my later ones, although I’m yet to understand exactly how. Much of my learning has been more self-directed than many other forms of education, mainly because I needed to hold down a job to pay for it and the full-time route was rarely an option. 

I’m not alone when it comes to adult learning. The Open University and other similar initiations survive mainly due to people deciding later in life that learning has value, both in terms of work opportunities and a need to quell the insatiable curiosity that afflicts so many adult learners. 

But there are other advantages to life-long learning, including higher levels of subjective wellbeing and slower cognitive decline, at least when comes to specific type of learning. 

But how are adult learners different to younger learners?

Adult learners certainly have some disadvantages, but these are very much dependent on age. Younger people appear better at learning than older ones, but adults tend to have a larger store of prior knowledge on which to draw. This latter point makes intuitive sense, after all, if we adopt the premise that present learning is influenced by previous learning, adults are much better equipped than teenagers.

However, current knowledge might also interfere with new learning and, in many cases, the knowledge us older folks have is out of date and no longer accurate (and we can be pretty reluctant to let go of it). From the perspective of schema theory, while we can update schemas via re-consolidation processes, it’s still going to be difficult and quite slow-going. 

Another factor is motivation, and this is perhaps where adults do have a distinct advantage. Many older learners may well be motivated in a different way, for example, because they have a personal desire to know more about a certain topic (intrinsic motivation) rather than through external rewards or the need to avoid sanctions (extrinsic motivation). 

Adult learning is often intentional and self-directed with some concrete goal in mind. It can also be a response to one’s situation in life or a particular life stage. Adults have more control over their learning, which is perhaps why levels of wellbeing are often higher in older learners. Roberson and Merriam (2005), for example, studied learners age between 75 and 87 in rural Georgia, discovering that their participants benefited from a sense of purpose and control, both of which have a tendency to diminish in older age.

The Role of Executive Function 

Younger adults may be at a particular advantage when it comes to self-directed learning, due to maturing executive function (EF). Executive functions are thought to be higher order cognitive skills that are able to influence other skills. They, therefore help us to sustain attention, keep goals and information in mind, refrain from responding immediately, resist distraction, tolerate frustration, consider the consequences of different behaviours, reflect on past experiences, and plan for the future.

It’s immediately obvious that well-developed executive function can be useful in a wide variety of learning environments. Indeed, executive function has been found to predict a wide range of education outcomes, including school performance, social competence and transition from one school stage to another (Zelazo et al., 2017).

Executive function is also implicated in better physical health of young people, leading to lower rates of drug related problems and criminal convictions in adulthood.

EF is generally thought to involve three important skills: working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. More widely, EF is associated with emotional regulation (the ability to use emotions appropriately, such as remaining relatively calm under pressure) and meta-cognition (being aware of our own learning).

EF follows a developmental trajectory, so older students are better equipped to utilise these skills than younger ones. EF tends to develop through subjective experience, and older people just have more of it. Motivation and emotion also tend to go hand in hand, with so-called constructive emotions having a positive impact on many aspects of learning (Mega et al. 2014).

Self-directed Learning

Self-directed learning (SDL), as its name implies, is where the learner is in control of the process, rather than a teacher or instructor. According to Morris:

Self-directed learning is a process in which a learner assumes responsibility to control their learning objectives and means in order to meet their personal goals or the perceived demands of their individual context. A salient feature of this process is that a learner’s learning means and objectives are highly individual; they are differentiated in accordance with their life situation. The learner(s) themselves represent a central and salient feature of their context (Morris, 2019). 

Consequently, self-directed learners display a number of important characteristics (Tekkol and Demirel, 2018)

• They set clear goals for themselves.
• They shape their learning process in line with goals and plans.
• They monitor their own learning process.
• They evaluate the outcomes of their own learning.
• They are autonomous
• They have self-motivation
• They are open to learning
• They are curious
• They are willing to learn
• They value learning
• They have self-control
• They take initiative to learn

These skills are found in the most successful adult learners. Whether or not they can also be identified in younger learners is open to a great deal of debate.

A 2018 study by Sima Zach and colleagues suggests that it can be successful for college students, but, realistically, younger learners may be less likely to possess the required attributes (a generalisation, of course).

Roberson et al. (2021), however, argue that disruption experienced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has made SDL at all levels of education more important than ever.

Learning later in life, therefore, isn’t just about the way the brain acquires and retains information, it’s also about behaviour, character and personality traits. But there is also a deeper, more existential component at play, in that learning, for many, provides a sense of purpose.