Components Of Andragogy

SDL originated from Malcolm Knowles’ introduction of the term andragogy, where the first of five assumptions was that adult learners are capable of directing his or her own learning. Knowles began his inquiry of how learning as adult differs from learning as a child by looking at how social roles differ for a child and adult he developed the five assumptions of andragogy. Knowles noted that a child’s primary role is a student, to learn the basic knowledge required to take on learning as an adult, where the primary role then becomes being an individual contributor to society. Adults are faced with carrying out roles such as employee, parent, caregiver, and so on that require knowledge beyond the basic knowledge obtained as a child. The roles …show more content…
The first component being to identify the learning needs is being able to decide what needs to be learned as well as how to best achieve the learning. This can be seen as an adult that has just discovered they will be a parent now has a need to learn about parenting and now must decide whether to take parenting classes or read about the subject to obtain the knowledge they seek. The second component of SDL, which is to formulate learning goals meaning that the learner must decide when they have obtained the knowledge on the subject they choose whether that is incremental knowledge to an ultimate learning goal or brief knowledge of the subject. For instance, an employee in sales notices that they have trouble attracting the interest of customers, so the employee researchers how to attract customers to your product. The employee realizes from their research that a salesman must be able to know the immediate needs of their customers to grab their attention and the salesman alters their selling point to fit individual customers as a result of their …show more content…
In the case of the new parent the individual might identify the internet, talking to a friend who is already a parent or reading parenting books as resources. The fourth component is choosing and implementing learning strategies to help learn the subject chosen. This going back to the example of the employee can be deciding how to use the new knowledge of knowing their customer’s needs. In this example, the salesman might observe a coworker that always exceeds their sales goal to see how they pick out their customer’s needs to close a sale. The final component of SDL, to evaluate learning outcomes is the learner deciding if the learning was effective in them obtaining the knowledge they desired. In the example of the salesman, this would be the salesman’s self-evaluation of whether they are now meeting their sales goal as a result of their observation of their coworker’s interaction with