An exploratory study of adult learning resulting from locally initiated community group programs illustrates approaches to qualitative and, more particularly, naturalistic evaluation. The use of a proxy list and the blending of independently derived abstract and concrete initial category labels proved particularly useful in the categorization…

Analysis of communicative interactions of community residents using interviews, diaries, and tape recordings revealed how learning may occur incidentally in social organizations, chance meetings, and other community interactions. Such community learning serves to transmit skills, knowledge, and values. Community groups provide pathways to skilled…

Reviews research on learning among visitors to museums and other interpretive sites. Discusses central and peripheral information processing, need for cognition, intrinsic motivation, visual memory, and metacognition. Describes an evaluation model for exhibits and programs that incorporates visitor learning. (SAS)

Discusses the cognitive consequences of education, and reviews evidence which supports the hypothesis that differences in the social organization of education promote differences in the organization of learning and thinking skills in the individual. Proposes that new accommodations are needed between school-based learning and learning experiences…

A model for workplace learning is presented, which intends to integrate formal and informal learning with the use of e-learning. An important underlying assumption is that the integration of formal and informal learning is necessary in order to create desirable competencies, from both an individual and an organisational perspective. Two case…

This paper, a discussion of papers by Robert S. Randall, Greta Fein, Richard Bauman and Murray Newman, looks at informal learning from an anthropological viewpoint with an emphasis on inversive theory. It is suggested that the irrational elements of informal learning, the combinations of order and disorder, allow children to relate to reality by…

Children's solutions to simple word problems requiring addition or subtraction skills develop through four stages: (1) modeling with objects; (2) utilization of both modeling and counting strategies; (3) reliance on counting strategies; and (4) reliance on number facts. The current primary mathematics curriculum fails to capitilize on rich…

Suggests that stories about the classroom experiences of expert teachers can provide novice or struggling teachers with knowledge useful to their own situations. Presents a cyclical model of learning from expert stories--the textual assimilation interchange--in which the text of the story brings the reader (learner) into the expert's world and…

Arguing against a concept of learning as only a formal process occurring in explicitly educational settings like schools, the paper proposes a conception of the workplace as a learning environment focusing on the interaction between the affordances and constraints of the social setting, on the one hand, and the agency and biography of the…

Notes that the new trend in business toward informal learning programs is meeting with success. Suggests alternatives to formalized training and means of implementing these learning techniques. (TA)

Interviews with skilled mine workers in Queensland, Australia, suggest that informal learning in the workplace enables authentic activities, access to experts, and sociocultural environment conductive to the development of expertise. Skilled work means technical competence in a context of sociocultural values. (SK)

A very important part of the learning process occurs during early childhood, before preschool and the first few grades. Teachers need to understand the characteristics of this early learning, and ask if they can be extended to later education. While the author's concern here is with computers, the results of such a study might also tell teachers…

A commonly accepted assumption in music education based on the apprenticeship tradition is that teachers deliver their musical expertise using pedagogically relevant methods that will help them to have effective mastery and control over the process of learning. This article decentres the traditional notion of mastery and pedagogy. Rather, it is…

The research reported in this paper attempts to document the actual learning practices of working-class people in the context of the much heralded "knowledge-based economy." Our primary thesis is that working-class peoples' indigenous learning capacities have been denied, suppressed, degraded or diverted within most capitalist schooling,…

Informal training is known to be the dominant skill acquisition strategy for the majority of workers in India and many other economically developing countries and there is much benefit in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this form of training. A participant observation case study was undertaken in northern India to investigate these…