Since the terms cognition and cognitive are broadly used but not clearly defined, it may be helpful to clarify what is meant by noncognitive factors. In cognitive science, the terms cognition and cognitive generally describe mental processes that are informational insofar as they carry information about the organism's own body and the material world. Thus defined, there are three sorts of noncognitive organismic factors important in adult learning: affective processes, self-developmental processes, and hardware factors (i.e., noninformational, purely organismic constraints such as mental capacity/working memory limitations, gestaItist field factors, etc.). In this series of papers, we attempt to show how these noncognitive factors interact with cognitive factors to facilitate adult learning. We outline and give reference to a dialectical constructivist (neoPiagetian) model of the psychological organism that integrates noncognitive with cognitive factors and that can serve to explicate the findings of the literature and to process/task analyze adult learning. An important aim is the integration of the findings of decline and regression from the cognitive literature with the findings regarding the increase in "self-directedness" reported by adult education theorists. This is explicated through a process-analytic account of the will, particularly as it pertains to noncognitive factors. In Part II, we continue our explication of a dialectical model of the ego and conclude with a discussion of modes of learning/instruction in adulthood.
In Part I, we presented a dialectical constructivist account of the role of dynamic syntheses in learning and the modes of abstraction and how these relate to processes of adult learning. Our intent was to provide an explanation and integration of well-known research findings regarding three important issues: (1) the decline of mental effort with aging; (2) the contrasting findings about post-formal competencies and wisdom in later years; and (3) the ways in which these findings can be related to the often prescriptive accounts of adult education theorists, who discuss the role of self-directedness in adult learning. In Part II, we now turn to discuss a process-analytic account of the ego and the will in order to explain how the various modes of abstraction are employed in adult learning and how self-directedness can be brought about. We then conclude with a description of the types of instruction based on the ideas about modes of learning and abstraction that were discussed in the two papers.
Some of the chief characteristics of the narrative psychology of Bruner, Polkinghorne, Sarbin, Freeman, Howard, and White and Epston are outlined with implications for therapy discussed. Narrative psychology is then related to some current models of adult development, including those of Kegan, Perry, Belenky, Labouvie-Vief, Levinson, Basseches, and PascualLeone. Types of narrative competence are discussed and an argument is made that developmental readiness for narrative must be considered if narrative approaches are going to be applied. Different types of narrative approaches are shown to be indicative of particular developmental stages. The social relativism of narrative psychology is addressed and it is argued that developmental models provide a scheme for assessing the maturity of alternative narrative constructions.
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