This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the motivational orientations of non-traditional adult students to enroll in a degree-seeking program based on their academic goal. The Education Participation Scale (EPS) was used to measure the motivational orientations of participants. Professional advancement, cognitive interest, and educational…

Although mentoring programs can produce positive outcomes for youth, more research is needed that offers an account of how Black and Latino male mentors and mentees experience mentoring. This phenomenological study highlights the voices of a mentor and 14 Black and Latino males who are part of the Umoja Network for Young Men (UMOJA) an all-male,…

As the USA experiences rapid growth of nontraditional adult students in higher education, educators and institutions will increasingly need to look beyond the traditional youth-centric educational models to better address adult learning needs. To date, no research has been conducted examining the learning experiences of adult students enrolled in…

This research study examined the 2006 cohort of First-Time-in-College students from all 23 community colleges in Virginia. The goal was to examine fall-to-fall persistence and success in the first college-level mathematics course. Predictor variables used were developmental status, age, gender, and race and ethnicity of the student. Interaction…

This study explores substance use, psychosocial problems, and the relationships to educational status in 193 adolescents (school dropouts, 63; alternative education, 46; mainstream students, 84) who attended a substance abuse treatment facility in Dublin, Ireland, within a 42-month period. For each adolescent, data on demographics, family…

Since the Post-9/11 GI Bill was enacted in 2009, student veteran populations have nearly doubled while services that support their transition to higher education have dramatically increased. Despite a surge in resources, however, institutions are deficient in training faculty and staff about veterans' issues, consequently leaving student…

As with earlier social disparities in educational achievement, re-enrolment in college education can depend on parental social background. We link this finding with gender differences using data from the US National Longitudinal Study of Youth 79 and ask if the decision to re-enrol in college is influenced by parental social class in a…

Engaging students has been seen as the key to promoting their achievement in higher education institutions. However, there is an important stage prior to this: the development of a positive student identity which influences students' motivation to engage. As the student body has evolved from full-time, on-campus students entering university…

One of the fastest-growing subpopulations of nontraditional college students is military veterans who enroll in institutions of higher education following their returns from deployment. Although much research has been conducted on veteran-students, much of that work has focused on issues such as veterans' finances or academic achievement,…

Roughly half of all undergraduate students in the United States fail to persist to degree completion (American College Testing [ACT], 2010; Tinto, 1993; U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Adult students often have higher levels of attrition than traditional-age students (Justice & Dornan, 2001;…

The drivers of globalization are changing how, where, and when international business (IB) is being taught, and increasing student diversity. Concomitantly, education is becoming an important contributor to GDP in developed economies. Today, the same course may be taught at home to domestic and in-bound international students, in host countries,…

This paper is a reflection, on the basis of empirical research conducted in Italy, on theoretical, methodological and systemic-organisational aspects linked to the recognition and validation of the prior learning acquired by adult learners or workers who decide to enrol at university at a later stage in their lives. The interest in this research…

This paper reports on a longitudinal project examining how a group of students from diverse backgrounds succeeded in higher education. The project explored participants' pathways into higher education, how they managed their studies, and their reflections at course completion. In this paper, the concept of perspective transformation is used…

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are typically Spanish-speaking, Latino immigrants with limited formal education and low literacy skills and, as such, are a vulnerable population. We describe the development of the "Pesticides and Farmworker Health Toolkit", a pesticide safety and health curriculum designed to communicate to farmworkers…