Andragogy is the teaching of adult learners. It is significantly different from pedagogy, or the teaching of children. According to Hiemstra and Sisco (1990), under “the pedagogical model, the teacher has full responsibility for making decisions about what will be learned, how it will be learned, when it will be learned, and if the material has been learned.”[1] Moreover, the teacher also determines which medium should be used in that transmission. Andragogy, on the other hand, is based on transactional methodology where the teacher designs and manages “a process for facilitating the acquisition of content by the learners” and serves “as a content resource [who can] provide leads for other content resources.”[2] In short, adult learning is highly self-directed, experiential, needs-based, and situationally-contexted. Because the process of adult teaching and learning is different from that of the process of child teaching and learning, it makes sense to posit that the process of assessment for adult learners ought also to be different from that of child learners. In an age of rapidly proliferating educational technologies being used to various degrees of success in classrooms on the primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate levels, moreover, the assessment strategies are going to have to evolve at the same pace as the teaching and learning methods.
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[1] “Moving from Pedagogy to Andragogy,” Adapted and Updated from R. Hiemstra, and B. Sisco, (1990). Individualizing Instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. See http://www-distance.syr.edu/andraggy.html for our source and for an impressive bibliography concerning andragogy. December 31, 2003.
[2] Donald Clark, “Andragogy,” Personal Website, Jan 22, 2000, http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/andragogy.html December 30, 2003.