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The report presents first results of a study dealing with the whereabouts of former participants of literacy classes. Assuming courses of adult education have a beginning and an end, the authors pursue the phenomena of participants sojourning permanently at adult education courses. Taken data material into account, the reconstruction of possible reasons for staying in the courses finally leads to the demand for an initial consulting – analogical to the starting and learning consultation in the …
The article describes the project „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ which is working as a meta-server to supply users with an information system of relevant data in the field of education, adult and further education. The internet is offering big quantities of information and the chance to build up complex documents. Both make it more difficult to select and evaluate information. The „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ incorporates information critically bringing it into an order making it easier for users to …
The article focuses on the characteristics of the virtual seminar form of »online group learning«. The online programme »Marketing for Continuing Educators« , which is part of the correspondence course »Adult Education« by the Distance & Independent Studies Centre at the technical University of Kaiserslautern, indicates the course of seminars of this sort. The role and function of presenting this type of seminar is particularly analyzed. Also, critical issues such as the anonymity of individual…
Education reports are a core element of the new governance model in the educational system: they provide data to support political decision-makers in evidence-based governance. For that purpose, indicators are developed to monitor context, input, processes and outcomes of educational efforts. This article analyzes actual report segments on further education in various report systems with respect to the picture of these dimensions of further education. The applicability of the existing indicator…
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 …
Adult education increasingly occupies the center of education policy and hence the corresponding governance aspirations on the national, supra- and international level. Large-scale-assessment studies, like PIAAC, further raised public attention for adult education with a focus on the low educated. This study analyzes overall and spatial participation in adult education in the national context using multi-level modeling. Using data from the European Labour Force Survey 2013 it shows that (1) the…
As a result of the current migration of several hundreds of thousands refugees in Germany alone, concepts for successful language training become increasingly important. The integration programme funded by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) plays a central role. This article refers to data collected by the author regarding success factors for language learning. In this qualitative study, 51 interviews were conducted with integration programme participants in a reception centre…
The study Competencies in Later Life (CiLL) provides for the first time representative data regarding the competencies of older people between the age of 66 to 80 years in three different domains: literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It is shown that there are significant differences between people with different qualification, but also between people of different birth cohorts. Despite major qualification differences between men and women, there are no signi…
Can the benefit derived from a course in further education be measured? Which methodological considerations are to be taken into account? It must be defined first of all which indicators are supposed to indicate the benefit. Evaluators and stakeholders must agree on set points. Data have to be collected using the methods of qualitative as well as quantitative research. Under evaluation aspects, anecdotic evidence has no value. At the end of the article, the author sums up four basic methods of …
The Northrhine-Westphalian labour ministry, in a research project carried out by the Landesinstitut für Qualifikation (State’s Institute for Qualification) in Soest, investigated what possible contribution to immigrant integration might be expected from the State’s institutions of further education. The results, laid down in the study „The contribution of further education twoards the integration of immigrants”, look like a list of shortcomings: insufficient data, an unclear market structure, a…
