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.
Research on learning - a retrospective The history of empirical research on adults’ learning reaches back until the twenties of the last century. This contribution evokes some interpretative research on the pedagogy of learning and teaching for adults. It seems that the adult education sciences’ disciplinary memory is underdeveloped as many instructive older analysis seem to have fallen into oblivion. Recent studies mostly don’t pay attention to the linkages and continuity of the questions. …
Geringqualifizierte stellen eine wichtige Teilgruppe Bildungsbenachteiligter dar, die mit erhöhten Arbeitsmarkt- und Beschäftigungsproblemen konfrontiert sind. Angesichts der Bedeutung lebenslangen Lernens als wichtige Strategie zur Sicherung von Beschäftigungsfähigkeit geht Ingrid Ambos der Frage nach, inwieweit gegenwärtig in der Bundesrepublik Geringqualifizierte in Maßnahmen beruflicher Weiterbildung einbezogen werden. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt in diesem Zusammenhang den verschiedenen Einfl…
The article presents key findings of a study on the attitude towards education among immigrants. The study also covers interests in continuing education particularly with regard to parent education programmes.
European migration happens predominantly within the European member states. It is influenced by the target countries‘ work and social systems. In this context, Germany is the most important immigration country, which is confronted by new fields of activity in continuing education generated by the international influx of refugees.
This paper brings into focus the discourse on competences and reviews critically the potential of large-scale assessments. The measurement of competences in adulthood is a step towards a deeper understanding of the development of competences during the life course, although only domain specific and not general competences are taken into consideration. Based on the current research, the debate on competences will be reflected and the central points in the field of modeling the constructs of skil…
The German Adult Education Centres (VHS) consider themselves as further learning institutions for all whose aim it is to address the population at large. However, the data basis on the extent to which socially disadvantaged groups are reached is restricted. The present contribution investigates to which extent persons with a low level of school education are represented among the participants of the Adult Education Centres in Berlin. The investigation is linked to previous results of the resear…
First results from the PIAAC survey, which was conducted in 25 countries, will be published in October 2013 by OECD. PIAAC collected information about adult competencies through representative data from a background questionnaire and from assessments of three competence domains. In Germany exists an additional study called "Competencies in Later Life" (CiLL), which is designed for people (aged) between 66 and 80 years. This article presents the context of the study, the process of data collecti…
Labor economists argue that private investment in the training of workers may be too low. This view is based on the notion of worker skills being a common-pool resource available in principle to any employer. Such under-investment ought to be more pronounced the less difficult it is for outside firms to exploit the skills of workers qualified elsewhere. Thus, higher labor turnover may be expected to reduce firms’ commitment to developing worker qualifications; investment in general skills shoul…
Positive learning experiences in childhood, adolescence, as well as during employment have a favourable effect on learning in old age. From a gerontological perspective, the significance of school education and of professional qualifications attained later in life for educational behaviour in the post-employment phase can be explained with the continuity theory. To evaluate the relevance of one’s educational biography, a representative survey was conducted. 500 individuals at the age from 50 to…
It is controversial whether vocational basic and continuing education is substitutable or complementary. This report approaches the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective with a special focus on company sizes and provides empirical results on the basis of the IAB-Betriebspanel (representative employer survey). The valuations of a bivariate probit model also indicate the dependency of complementary and substitutional correlations on the individual company size.
