Although attitude is an important influence on the decision to participate, there are few instruments to assess attitude toward continuing education. Furthermore, there is little empirical information about the properties of the most widely known instrument, the Adult Attitude Toward Continuing Education Scale (AACES). This study subjects the AACES to a rigorous examination. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three-dimensional structure of attitude with three factors, Enjoyment of Learning, Perceived Importance, and Intrinsic Value. A substantial number of the AACES items were judged extraneous, and a nine-item Revised Attitude Toward Continuing Education Scale (RAACES) was constructed. Through structural equation modeling, it was demonstrated that RAACES was conceptually sound, and each of its three dimensions of attitude was significantly related to participation behavior. The nine-item RAACES is recommended for use in future studies of attitudes and participation in adult education.
Data from a survey of veterinarians was used to test the applicability of two competing models of behavioral intention to participate in a continuing professional education (CPE) program. The Triandismodel accounted for nearly 50% of the variance in intention to participate and proved to have greater predictive utility than the Fish be in and Ajzen model. Disciminant analysis revealed that 85% of the respondents were classified appropriately as participants and non-participants by the variables in the behavioral intention model. The results strongly support the hypothesis that variables external to thebehavioralintentionmodelindirectlyinfluencebehavioralintentionandparticipationbehavior. The study extends existing research by identifying essential social psychological variables for inclusion in the development of a future theoretical model of CPE participation. Implications for future research are proposed.
The purposes of this study were to determine the extent to which graduate students contributed to thebody of research through publication in Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ) and to shed some light on aspects of knowledge production and dissemination processes in graduate adult education programs. Graduate student contributors to volumes 19 through 38 were identified from two mailed surveys conducted ten years apart. The surveys sought information on the content of graduate research, the graduate programs and faculty who supported it, and the levels of graduate study involved. In addition, the surveys sought information on the characteristics of the student authors, including their sex, level of graduate study, motivation for undertaking non-required research, research dissemination activities and current professional occupations and duties. An overall survey response rate of 88.5% was achieved. The data revealed that 113 students, as authors and co-authors, published 128 articles in the journal over the 20 year period under study. Forty six percent of all journal articles published were written by graduate student authors. Seventy articles were written by lone authors, 50 were written with one other person and eight were co-authored with two other persons. The study findings confair that graduate student contributions to AEQ have been underestimated by prior studies and that adult education departments mediate the influence of the field of education on the development of the discipline and knowledge building to a greater extent than previously recognized. Graduate publication activity in AEQ was associated with program location and gender was associated with research content and dissemination activities. Implications for further research into the processes by which knowledge is produced in adult education are presented.
This study reports the development of a Thurstone Scale to measure attitudes toward adult education. Fifty-four expert judges assigned ratings to 116 items in an item pool. Forty items met the criteria for inclusion in the scale and the method of successive intervals was used to calculate the scale item values. The validity of the scale was assessed against five criterion variables in a study in which 28 of the scale items were used with a sample of 263 adult patients in the medical practice of a family physician. Scores on the attitude scale were correlated with years of schooling, social participation, socio-economic status, internal-external locus of control and participation in adult learning activities. Although small in magnitude the correlation coefficients obtained were all in the anticipated direction and were statistically significant beyond the .01 level supporting the concurrent validity of the scale in the study. The homogeneity of the 40 scale items was tested by factor analysis of responses from 338 adult education participants. The analysis yielded nine factors accounting for 75.1 per cent of the variance and indicated that attitudes toward adult education, as quantified by the scale, are multifactorial. Second order factor analysis revealed three underlying factors with one dominant factor emerging.
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