Self-Directed Learning: A Paradigm Shift

Self-Directed learning: A paradigm shift in analyzing adult motivation

As the modern workplace continues to change with nearly breathtaking speed, and even social networking and personal connections are more apt to be created online than offline, it has become increasingly critical for adults to make learning basic, technical, and even high-level skills an important part of their personal and professional lives, lest they be left behind on the wrong side of the digital divide. But adults are spending more hours at work, and this makes pursuing educational opportunities difficult when juggling the pressures of running a household, going to a full-time job, and maintaining a healthy life and work balance. One option is self-directed learning for adults, through part-time educational efforts, often with a distance or online component. But past studies have suggested that the motivation to make the decision to participate in adult educational opportunities can be highly variable and are affected by complex psychological, economic, and social factors. The degree to which such factors come into play, remains highly controversial and the paradigm used to analyze adult motivation during new learning experiences invariably affects the prescriptions of how to make adult learning more accessible, how to increase adult motivation to continue in education, and how the adult learner's classroom should be constructed.

Bender and Valentine (1990) have postulated a series of factors in their Deterrents to Participation Scale (DPS) for adult education and labeled the main factors influencing motivation to embark upon education are: lack of confidence, lack of course relevance, time constraints, low personal priority, cost, and personal problems. Their analysis emphasizes the economic reasons individual to decide to participate in adult education, consistent with an approach called a 'cost-benefit' analysis of decision-making and motivation. In a cost-benefit approach, it is assumed that: "Behavior is forward-looking and consistent over time. Persons try to anticipate uncertain consequences of actions. Actions are constrained by income, time, imperfect memory and calculating capacities and other limited resources and opportunities. Time is the major constraint [to non-participation]....individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs....Benefits include the cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, whereas costs include the forgone value of the time spent on these investments" (Stowe 1998, p.13). Participation in learning efforts occurs when the benefits of participation outweigh the costs. Of course, someone might poorly weigh their prospective options, and decide that making more money at a second job is a better use of their time than going back to school with the aim of getting a single, better-paying job in the long run. But this decision-making model always assumes that people try to rationally weigh their options, and that by removing obstacles, such as time (through online learning) and personal problems (by providing on-site childcare for single mothers), motivation to embark upon continued education will increase. It also assumes that the adult's level of motivation will stay relatively constant, inside of the classroom and without, barring unforeseen shifts in circumstance. Although it allows that non-economic factors can affect a cost-benefit analysis, it also tends to give priority to economic motivation above other forms of motivation.

A similar theory to the cost-benefit model of decision-making is a utility model, where educational activity is viewed as an investment. It assumes the individuals look at the expected return on an investment in education in terms of earnings, compared with investing in other things like job tenure. Then, the prospective leaner decides what option offers more utility (Stowe 1998, pp.13-14). Motivation is assumed to be lower if only personal enrichment is at stake, consistent with findings by Basile and Henry (1984) that cost is deemed a major factor in determining whether an individual embarks upon adult education. In support of this paradigm Basile and Henry also note what they found to be a surprising finding, namely that life changes more often acted as a deterrent and a barrier to adults embarking upon educational efforts, and made them less motivated to learn. In other words, rather than assuming that a change in their life circumstances might bring about a change in outlook, individuals became less motivated to seek out new opportunities. But this seems, contrary to what Basile and Henry hypothesized, intuitively unsurprising, given that a pregnancy, sickness of a loved one, or loss of a job would naturally turn the individual's focus from improving their life to merely maintaining their economic circumstances. A life change might lead the learner to assume that focusing on addressing the change provided more utility than the benefits of the unknown, of embarking upon adult education.

However, recent studies have begun to question this individually-focused paradigm of personal motivation. For example, in a case study of one community of Cambodian women, all of whom initially appeared highly motivated to learn English, researchers deployed both empirical and anecdotal data to determine why so many women dropped out of the program. The results suggested a reframing of the questions posed by earlier researchers, which focused on individual, rational decision-making and utility calculus when deciding to embark upon or continue an educational program. "In this study, the central question is not: Why are some adult ESL learners motivated to participate while others are not? Instead, the question is: How do the multiple identities of students, the social contexts of their lives in the United States, and the classroom context shape their investment in participating in adult education programs" (Skilton-Sylvester 2003, p.9). The experiences of the women suggested that what appeared to be low levels of motivation and high attrition rates in adult education was not a problem of individual motivation or logistical complications, or a lack of a perceived potential from participating in an adult ESL classroom (Skilton-Sylvester 2003, p.9). Instead, cultural factors were found to play a profound role in the women's decision-making, beyond a rational utility calculus about how to best allocate their time as learners. For example, many of the immigrant women saw an essential conflict between their role in the household and their acquisition of a language, which, if they became superior at such a language, they would become 'superior' to their husbands, who did not speak English at home, even if this would increase their learning potential (Skilton-Sylvester 2003, p.9). "For Lang, who was engaged during the fieldwork period, her marriage meant potentially ending her work as a cashier at the family restaurant. In effect, her new identity as wife became more important than her old role as worker in the family business. Because it was work-related language needs that brought her to class, getting married was tied to ending participation because she would no longer be working in this job, not because her husband opposed it. For Sundara, her identity as wife seemed irrelevant to her participation. When class met in the morning, her husband worked and her children were in school; her role as student was relatively separate from her role as spouse. Her identity as a mother was much more of a facilitator and barrier to her participation (Skilton-Sylvester 2003, p.21).

Utility of education, in this case, learning English, cannot be reckoned in purely dollars and cents terms but also in terms of social identity. In the first subject's case, family needs and a sense of duty drove her to take ESL classes, and when she took on a different role and entered into a different family context, her behavior changed as her identity-perception changed. Although she was not being pressured to quit by her new husband, and although she lived in an English-speaking society and economically she could have improved her position and the position of her family through working, emotions and cultural expectations played a profound role in her thinking and motivation to continue learning. Even the social experience of being in the class was not enough to outweigh preconceived assumptions of how a married woman should behave in relation to her husband.

This is not to deny that certain economic disincentives to participate such as cost of childcare might act as an immediate barrier to many women from going back to school and making more money in the long run. But in the case of some women, the psychic cost they would bear, the loss of a conventional female identity, and the self-perception they were not a good wife, even if their husband did not directly, vocally oppose going to school was equally influential as logistical problems. Merely addressing these women's logistical concerns would not be enough to enhance their motivation to attend class. Even in the case of women without physical obstacles (who were stay-at home mothers and could go to class while their children were at school) cultural barriers remained a barrier to continuing in the program. The study of the Cambodian women supports a new method of analyzing decisions regarding education, called a case-based model. This model "does not assume individuals have beliefs in the absence of data," and also takes into consideration costs and benefits and utility analysis, but "it does not list all possible costs and benefits because only those cases in the memory (not hypothetical situations) can be used in reaching the decision," in other words, certain life examples may have more emotional weight than others (Stowe 1998, p. 15).

The policy implications of adopting such a model are profound, given that they suggest that merely removing barriers such as childcare demands or providing transportation may not be enough to deter individuals from their psychological motivational obstacles to enhancing their learning, and that the decision to embark upon and continue an educational program is highly subjective. In the cost-benefit theory, variables that affect decisions and motivational levels are tuition, materials, transportation, value of time invested in learning, expected income, although it does take into consideration how age, race, school completed, reason for resuming school may create a perception of greater or less economic costs of the education. The utility model views educational activity as financial investment and looks at the expected rate of return in increased earnings vs. working during the hours one must spend studying and in the classroom (Stowe 1998, p. 16). Participation may be influenced by incomplete knowledge about the benefits of education, but once these barriers are overcome, motivation is assumed to be higher, even though in the case of the Cambodian women, such knowledge was not the major part of their decision-making process, and may have acted as a deterrent, as it may have affected their relationship with their husbands in a way that was culturally unacceptable to them as well as the male members of the society (Stowe 1998, p.16).

Online learning, for example, has been suggested as a convenient way to address logistical complaints. But by taking learners outside of a social learning community at all, motivation may decrease some learner's motivational levels even further, even without cultural barriers. The new paradigm acknowledges that motivations and obstacles to participation can be perceptual and situation-based, rather than something that can be measured in terms of general physical factors that can apply to all situations, or the irrelevance of the course to desired economic advancement. Motivation may seem high in the classroom, and decrease outside of the classroom, when homework is due and the individual is in a new cultural context outside of the classroom. Teachers and program designers must keep this in mind when relating to students, in terms of how they motivate student performance to strive to create a motivational carry-over effect.