Document Type

Article

Abstract

The information explosion in our technologically oriented society has brought with it a shortened time span of cultural and factual knowledge change in each succeeding decade. Thus, professionals being educated in graduate Adult Education/Human Resources Development programs as teachers and for other roles need a lifelong learning perspective to prevent their becoming obsolete. These graduate programs have increased in North America from approximately thirty in 1960 to more than three hundred in 1990. However, a question remains for those who seek to serve these needs. How will the long-term impact of these graduate programs be measured, determined and evaluated? One program has sought to answer that major question. The University of Missouri-St. Louis has had competency-based adult education graduate offerings with nearly two hundred participants in less than a decade the graduate program has been actively in operation. A two-page "Impact Survey Report Form" was adapted and developed to include Kirkpatrick's evaluation paradigm of reaction, learning, behavior, and results. One hundred eighty-six different participants were sent forms with seventy-five responding. Questions included: what they gained, applied, the value to them and others, skill practice adequacy, cost/'benefit ratio, benefits resulting, how the course could be improved, people served weekly, space to describe something they used and the results, how the use of self-directed learning affected other courses or their career, if they used learning contracts in other courses and in other education situations with people with whom they worked, and how self-directed learning was accepted in those situation.

Publication Date

January 1990

Publication Title

Ninth Annual Midwest Research-To-Practice in Adult, Continuing and Community Education

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