Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
Services
Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
Competences assessed with the ProfilPASS for Young Adults can be used effectively by pupils for vocational choices, if the ProfilPASS is embedded in educational career guidance and supervised by qualified ProfilPASS counsellors. Previous experience reveals the imperative knowledge of the tool, its consultative approach and the particular field of application – the school context. The publication presents examples of implementation as well as practical recommendations for the successful applicat…
While belief research has become an integral part of the educational research agenda, it has been uneven. One neglected area is the beliefs of adult education teachers. Focusing on five such teachers working in adult basic education and teaching numeracy in Switzerland, this exploratory study uses different data to describe their beliefs about numeracy and its teaching. It is shown that this group holds clearly different views from other groups of adult teachers and it is argued that extending …
Proceeding from the educational policy objective of achieving greater participation in continuing education, this article presents a set of instruments with which the learning and educational behaviour of adults can be measured statistically. Taking the example of data selected from the Continuing Education Reporting System (Berichtssystem Weiterbildung (BSW)) and the Adult Education Survey (AES), the potential for analysis and the generation of knowledge offered by statistics on continuing edu…
Natural Sciences as a Constitutive Element of Modern Adult Education Imparting natural scientific knowledge to a socially broad audience was already quite common in manifold forms before adult education as such was really constituted in the last third of the 19th century. Some of the questions raised when natural science spread in the 18th and 19th centuries are still or again relevant in the 21st century. This paper tries to demonstrate that notion in a summarized form on the basis of an ex…
Recent international trends in Adult Education (AE) mirror the diverse realities this field is experiencing around the world. This article discusses the trend towards democratization through a revision of existing knowledge in three main domains: theory, research and practice. First, a theoretical framework of democratization as applied in AE will be outlined. Second, recent research developments will be reviewed as they inform the process of democratization through Adult Education which is occ…
Counselling: Changes for a Sustainable Development If counselling should survive as a generally accepted human service at the beginning of the 21st century, a fundamental shift in paradigms and the therewith connected development of sustainable offers for counselling becomes necessary. Permanent co-evolution of needs from clients, economy and society calls for specific skills and knowledge for analysis and coping with multiple subjective realities, ecological contexts, non-linear causalities…
Research on learning of distance learners An empirical insight into the practice of distance learning Albeit the high relevance of distance education and distance studies in the field of lifelong learning strategies, there is only few knowledge on the actual process in which the distant student learns. This article presents and discusses the results of a research project, in which distance students filled in questionnaires concerning their learning several times a week over a period of thre…
Designing consultancy Research on consultancy for adult education and extracurricular youth education? Besides a scientific debate, the following contribution is about facing the challenge of the action competence consultancy in the context of making pedagogues professionals. The aim is to modify and design existing interdisciplinary knowledge for consultancy in the context of adult education. How consultancy in the practice of adult education can be analysed interdisciplinary and which po…
Critical adult education Adult education in the horizon of contemporary societal criticism The essay contacts basic lines of the early critical theory in order to connect it with power analytical surveys on neoliberal restructuring of education. Foucaults analytics of power serves as a guide to decipher the current self-organisation discourse in adult education as part of a power-knowledge-complex. Thereby the present reform strategies manifest themselves as gouvernemental arrangements for …
Changes in the managerial staff of (educational) organizations bring about times of transition with multiple challenges. How can members of the staff be prepared to assume leadership positions? How can new personnel be found and attracted to stay? How can the induction period and the effective transfer of knowledge be organized? To successfully meet all these challenges, a forward-looking strategy is needed, which can be used as groundwork for concrete measures regarding managerial changes. Thi…
