Motivated at Adult Education Centers - Uptake of Educational Programs at AECs

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia Gorges
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 521238420

Participation of all people in lifelong learning (i.e., continuous participation in further education) is a key factor for successful economic, social and individual development. However, participation in further education is unequally distributed in society: People with a high level of education participate significantly more often in further education compared to people with a low level of education. This finding can be attributed, among other things, to differences in favorable opportunity structures for participation. Recent studies indicate that motivation for further education can contribute to participation, especially among groups with limited educational credentials. Against this background, understanding the role of motivation for participation in further education and its outcomes – regarding people with a low educational level in particular - as well as the interaction of motivation for further education with other personal and contextual determinants of participation is an important research question in further education research. Assuming that lifelong learning in adulthood predominantly relies on people’s active pursuit of further education, the project aims to empirically test the scope of the expectancy-value model of education-related choice decisions, which is well established in the school and university context, with regard to participation in further education, in order to provide a theoretical framework for a more comprehensive consideration of motivational factors of further education participation in the promotion of lifelong learning. The project develops an analysis of psychological processes of the uptake educational offers on the basis of occupationally relevant courses of adult education centers, whose educational mandate includes the reduction of social disadvantages through target group-specific educational offers, and with special consideration of people with a low educational level. In order to test the hypotheses, non-experimental and experimental methodological approaches are combined, which allows for a high ecological validity and, at the same time, a high internal validity, especially of the postulated causal effects on antecedents of motivation for further education. The core of the project is a longitudinal study at 30 adult education centers, consisting of surveys of full-time pedagogical staff and course instructors as well as participants (study 1). The project will also examine the relevance of central aspects of course design - manifested in the course description - for participation using an experimental survey design (study 2). The research project thus makes a pioneering contribution to systematically conceptualizing motivation for further education as an essential condition of participation in further education and its positive effects (i.e., Wider Benefits of Learning), and to making motivation accessible to empirical testing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants