Life‐span Education: A Need for Research With Meaningful Prose

Abstract

The movement in favor of lifelong education has grown rapidly in the last 5 years and has provided the impetus for changing our philosophy and ideas concerning the critical needs and requirements for education and training for all age groups, including the elderly. Numerous authors, having questioned the notions of universal decline in various cognitive and intellectual abilities as a function of age, have begun to seek new approaches to studying the learning and memory performance of elderly groups and to place more emphasis on solving real-life, applied problems. Although there is this current emphasis on and critical need for extracting practical principles and teaching methods for use in the newly designed and future education and training programs for the elderly, it does not appear to be possible to generalize from the existing literature. Virtually all of the research in learning and memory has concentrated on analog tasks with unconnected words, digits, and letters, which may not be generalizable to situations that require the processing of meaningful connected discourse. Thus, there is a critical need for research using meaningful, non-laboratory-type prose materials to obtain data applicable to educational and training environments.

Cognitive Ageing and Psychological Growth

“…Other researchers, as well, have started to wonder if some apparent deficits are not restricted to the researchers' laboratory. 15 It must be remembered that most tasks used to assess the competencies of adults and ageing individuals were specifically developed and standardized to measure the skills of young people involved in formal educational settings. Piaget, 18 for example, concedes that he 'used rather specific types of experimental situations which were of physical and logical mathematical nature because these seemed to be understood by school children .…”

The Effects of Semantic Processing on Memory of Subjects Differing in Age

“…In this theory, stimulus meaning is thought to enhance retention in the elderly because it stimulates the elaborative processes that young subjects employ in dealing with meaningless materials. The implications of this interaction for life-long learning are positive, as has been brought out by Hultsch, 1977;Glynn & Muth, 1979;and Taub, 1980. The suggestion is that the more interesting the material or interested the student, the less old age will limit the educational outcome.…”

Nature and Amount Learned by Older Adults From a Documentary Program

“…For instance, the inclusion of questions might enable older adults to learn and retain a higher proportion of the ideas presented by a documentary (Richards & Denner, 1978;Taub, 1980). learned and retained reveals interesting differences in performance on the two tests.…”