Critiquing Adult Participation in Education, Report 1: Deterrents and Solutions via VALUEUSA

CAPE Research - Report 1: Deterrents and Solutions

VALUEUSA: 5.25.2018

What barriers do adults face to participating in adult education? What solutions do they recommend to get past those barriers?

The long awaited first report of the CAPE research gives insight on the deterrents and solutions of adult learners foregoing education. This is part one in a series of reports with two more reports scheduled for release by Summer 2018.

Critiquing Adult Participation in Education, Report 1: Deterrents and Solutions

Margaret Becker Patterson and Wei Song

Research Allies for Lifelong Learning

VALUEUSA May 2018

A recent report, The Forgotten 90%, revealed that only 10% of adults who need basic skills participate in the U.S. adult education system (Patterson, 2018). Educators and policymakers might ask the following important questions: What about the other 90%? Which deterrents do these nonparticipants face—and what might engage them to participate in adult education? VALUEUSA, a national non-profit organization committed to adult learner involvement and leadership, believed adults themselves could best answer questions on nonparticipation. VALUEUSA partnered with Research Allies for Lifelong Learning on the Critiquing Adult Participation in Education (CAPE) project to identify deterrents and seek solutions.

CAPE researchers conducted 25 group interviews with 125 adults in Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and Virginia. Interview sites included employment agencies and workforce and community service non-profits. None of the interviewees were currently engaged in adult education and three-fourths had never been. Adults identified and prioritized deterrents and solutions with researchers. The findings of this first in a series of CAPE reports are intended to inform policymakers and adult educators as they seek to engage more of the forgotten 90% in adult education.

Deterrents

Deterrents from the interviews were ranked in situational, dispositional, and institutional categories. Situational deterrents – transportation, family care needs, and money – were cited most often. Many adults in CAPE interviews were literally fighting to survive financially and seemed on the brink of losing their few resources from threats such as a car breakdown, a family emergency, or a job loss. Not having a support system was a fourth deterrent. Situations of early school leavers, antieducation pressures from the community, and unemployment, or (if employed) work-related pressures, rounded out the list of top situational deterrents. Various dispositional deterrents dissuaded adults from education, including influences from the past, health concerns or disabilities, struggles with behavior, lack of motivation, and little time for themselves. Anxiety or fear, as well as loss of confidence in themselves, also deterred adults from adult education. Institutional deterrents included requirements of education policies and procedures and ways in which adults perceived helpfulness of adult educators. Some adults simply did not know adult education existed within reach.

Solutions

Changing systems – or, as one adult put it eloquently, creating “alternative systems and alternative classes for alternative people”– is far from easy.  READ MORE >>

The CAPE project was funded with generous support from Dollar General Literacy Foundation