To examine what motivates mature people to begin a full-time educational program, a study was made of students at the Institute of Continuing Education (Londonderry, Northern Ireland), which runs a ...one-year, full-time, academically intense program in liberal studies for mature students with or without formal educational qualifications. The study was conducted along the lines of a 1950s study by J. Blumler of students at Ruskin College (Oxford, England) and had similar findings. Interviews of twenty students were conducted, from which a questionnaire was developed which was administered to forty-one students. The Londonderry study detected three relatively independent components among the many reasons cited for application to the program: (1) a vocational or instrumental component, expressed as a desire for a formal qualification and university entrance; (2) a social relevence component, expressed as a desire for a job which is both satisfying and serves others; and (3) an intellectual/cultural component, expressed as a desire to complete education, to do some serious study, and to regain or build self-confidence. (Tables of data, notes, and references are included.) (LMS)
Semistructured interviews with 14 adult basic education students from a sample of 45 were coded using grounded theory, yielding descriptions of experience in two phases: entering the class and being ...in class. A core category, "like school/not like school," appeared valuable in understanding how adults interpret their current experience in comparison with prior schooling. (SK)
Analysis of research on voluntary associations and social movements and a large-scale study of adult basic education suggest that personal influence is often an important component of an adult's ...decision to participate in formal education and may play a critical role in retention and instruction. (SK)
Experts in climate and water sciences from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, Serbia, and other European countries and the UNESCO gathered at the Serbian Academy of ...Sciences and Arts on the occasion of the 130th birthday anniversary of the geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch. The collection of their presentations is opened by an update on the climate situation after the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Further topics include various issues of paleoclimatology, in particular as it helps reduce uncertainties from which prospects for climate change suffer; ecohydrology and climate change at the watershed scale; and regional climate models, which are discussed in terms of both their improved modeling and their use in studies of a polynya in the Antarctica and expected changes in the Mediterranean region.
The growing respect for practice is not incompatible with theory. Reflective practice and participatory research stress the importance of linking theory with practice within concrete forms of ...everyday action. (SK)
