Adult students represent one of the fastest growing student populations within higher education. While their educational goals are similar to traditional students, the challenges and barriers they may encounter differ. Higher education institutions must assess their support services, coursework, and resources to determine if they meet the needs of…

One of the primary goals of higher education is to improve student critical thinking. Critical thought is a key factor in career readiness, a tool for survival that can enable one to escape oppression, and is ultimately a component of civic engagement. Even with this import, significant gains in critical thinking prove challenging to accomplish in…

The General Educational Development (GED) is a high school equivalency credential sought after by millions of Americans who do not hold a traditional high school diploma. This program evaluation offers insight to a local adult GED program as it seeks to increase the retention and GED completion rates of the students in their program. The…

Adult learners from the Caribbean diaspora continue to enroll in American colleges as they seek to improve their academic ambitions. As they do, they utilize varying instructional strategies to assist in achieving their educational goals, one of which is cooperative learning. While cooperative learning is widely used across different age groups…

Further and continuing education is not only important for individual employability, but also for regional development. Therefore, improving participation in further and continuing education and removing barriers to participation are key concerns of regional education governance. The present study was conducted in a peripheral region of…

This study examined adult learners' satisfaction, motivation, and engagement in online academic writing courses. Utilizing a mixed method, causal-comparative design, the study investigated the experiences of adult learners, who have distinctive characteristics from traditional learners. The findings revealed that adult learners are highly…

This mixed-methods descriptive study (with a qualifying survey to determine participants' eligibility) was conducted to investigate whether student engagement has an impact on academic performance for undergraduate nontraditional students in a community college environment. The research population was undergraduate nontraditional students who were…

Absenteeism and attrition pose serious challenges in government-funded adult ESL programmes, inhibiting success rates, jeopardising funding, and potentially threatening programmes' ability to continue to offer services. Because adult learners who enrol in programmes typically juggle numerous priorities and responsibilities beyond schooling, their…

This dissertation research reports on the experiences of a team of community college educators who develop, implement, and teach an introductory biology course on the inverted classroom platform. Research questions addressed include: (1) What have been the motivations and professional influences of the instructors for transitioning to the inverted…

The transition students face moving from Further Education (FE) to Higher Education (HE) can be a daunting experience. This transition to HE may require a substantial adjustment to a student mindset recognising that they would be responsible for their own learning and their eventual success compared to a FE environment where student learning is…

We examined how mature-aged, non-traditional students (studying part-time, working full-time) managed their multiple roles by testing a serial, indirect effects model, in which student role congruence (i.e., extent to which students structure role boundaries to meet their own and others' preferences) was related to study engagement, and where…

Mature students transitioning into their first year of higher education face many difficulties that affect their motivation, participation and success. Their feelings of being disconnected from their peers and from their institutions are among the key barriers to the successful completion of their courses. Encouraging online student engagement…

The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of adult education faculty toward developing and teaching online adult education courses in their master's programs to assist in our own transition to online adult education and to offer insight to others who may be interested in doing the same. Ten participants who work in fully online…

This study aimed to address research gaps and disparities among adult Vietnamese English as a second language (ESL) learners in adult education due to the model minority myth and broad generalization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) population. Despite their aspirations for an improved quality of life and integration into the U.S.…

This phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of engagement by non-traditional students in their online courses at a four-year university. The problem addressed by this study was nontraditional students' lack of engagement in their undergraduate online courses at four-year universities. Non-traditional students taking online courses…