COGNITIVE LEARNING PROCESSES OF SUCCESSFUL ADULT LEARNERS: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY.

Abstract

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170 p.

This phenomenological study was designed to explore the strategies and processes used by successful adult learners when engaged in cognitive learning activity. The study includes exploration of strategies the learner uses to obtain and assimilate information, the learner's perceptions and interpretations of the mental operations which occur, contextual preferences, time sequencing and how the learner knows when learning with understanding has been achieved. The exploration of the meaning of learning and the meaning of the individual learner's cognitive process was integral to the study.The informants were selected according to attributes identified as belonging to "high learners." These attributes include a high level of schooling (i.e., completion of an advanced degree, either academic or professional, beyond the baccalaureate), satisfaction with self and career, and acknowledgment of self as a successful learner.Interviews were analyzed for emergent themes within each of the components of the total process. The temporal dimension of learning has implications for curriculum design and implementation. A better awareness of the essential structures of the processes involved in cognitive learning as used by successful adult learners will be useful to those educators with responsibility for working with adults in various settings, particularly those in which the learner must be highly autonomous, such as graduate education and distance teaching.The Runic Process (a mysterious, subconscious process which apparently encodes, decodes, transfers and melds new information with old as the learner is occupied with other thoughts) was developed from this study and should be of particular interest to researchers in the study of learning. The seven informants in this study not only rely on the process for their learning projects but also describe this phenomenon better than is otherwise found in the literature.