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Based on data collected in the OECD project »Social Outcomes of Learning (SOL)«, empirical research findings and resulting policy recommendations were generated in the report »Improving Health and Social Cohesion through Education«, which are presented in this shortened and translated version. Due to the overall sparse empirical evidence of benefit research, future research forms and necessary methodological approaches are outlined.
The report includes a slightly revised version of a lecture held during the opening ceremony of the German Continuing Education Day in Berlin in 2012. The author focuses on the day’s central idea: surplus value of continuing education and pleads for the use of the benefit concept, which includes the individual’s perspective, as well as the concept of profit with regard to the social and organizational perspective.
The following article focuses the neglected relation between identity and learning by reconstructing foreign language learning efforts by adults. In spite of educational policy’s proclamation of (continuous) lifelong learning, real learning processes are characterised by various discontinuities. Adults deal with these discontinuities by perceiving, describing and structuring them dependent on their self-images as learners. Interpretations of interviews with adult language learners supply eviden…
Jyri Manninen presents empirical data on the »wider benefits of lifelong learning« collected in Finish adult education institutions (adult education centres, folk high schools, university summer schools, study and sport centres) in 2007. To present the results, a model concept on the wider benefits of learning was developed, which includes a quintuple classification of the term »benefits«: 1. »relevant benefits for the learning process «, 2. »direct benefits«, 3. »skills and competences«, 4. »a…