ESRA 2025 Preliminary Program
All time references are in CEST
Survey Research on Adult Education: Existing Challenges and New Opportunities 2 |
| Session Organisers |
Dr Kerstin Hoenig (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning)
Professor Erik Nylander (Linköping University)
Dr Verena Ortmanns (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning)
Professor Sylvia Rahn (German Institute for Adult Education Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning)
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| Time | Thursday 17 July, 13:45 - 15:00 |
| Room |
Ruppert 0.33 |
Compared to other sectors of the education system, Adult Education research is dominated by qualitative research, with a lower volume of publications using survey data. Surveys targeting adult learners, education providers or professionals often face similar problems due to the fragmented and unstructured nature of adult education and lifelong learning: Learning activities tend to be nonformal or informal, short and infrequent, there is a wide range of topics, courses and certificates, and the landscape of education providers is vast and ever-changing. This can lead to problems in sampling, recruiting and retention of survey subjects. This is especially true for complex stratified samples and panel studies. Cross-country comparisons are also complicated to conduct as each country has somewhat idiosyncratic adult learnings systems, with institutional infrastructures that differ in size and layout.
Nevertheless, multiple international and national surveys of adult education providers, professionals and learners exist, with PIAAC and the Adult Education Survey as the most well-known. Furthermore, recent developments in spatial data, machine learning, and web crawling have opened new opportunities for data collection, combinations of existing data sources, and mixed methods research.
In this session, we want to foster a dialogue between researchers who collect and analyze survey data on adult education, broadly defined. We welcome submissions of substantive research as well as methodological contributions. We especially invite submissions of innovative research designs or methods, efforts to combine survey data with other data sources, and international comparisons.
Keywords: adult education, lifelong learning
Papers
Institutionalized Lifelong Learning in 26 Countries: Why People With Vocational Degrees Participate Less in Further Education
Dr Nathan Breznau (DIE - German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning)
Dr Silke Schneider (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) - Presenting Author
Why are individuals with vocational degrees less likely to participate in adult learning and education (ALE)? Using new data from the 2022 cycle of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this study explores the relationship between vocational education pathways and lifelong learning across 26 countries. We show that at the individual level, vocational degrees do not significantly predict ALE participation once socioeconomic characteristics are accounted for. However, at the country level, higher prevalence of vocational degrees is associated with lower ALE participation, suggesting a systemic, institutional effect. We test this via multilevel regression models disaggregating within- and between-effects, and cross-level interactions. Countries with strong initial vocational training systems may underinvest both economically or in terms of values and behaviors, in later-life learning, reflecting trade-offs in educational priorities. While public investment and GDP generally promote ALE, their interaction with vocational degree prevalence reveals diverging institutional regimes. The findings underscore how national skill formation systems shape educational trajectories and raise new questions about how to support continuous learning among vocationally trained adults.
Worlds of adult learning: First results of a new adult learning pilot survey
Professor Richard Desjardins (UCLA) - Presenting Author
Professor Jan Kalenda (Tomas Bata University)
This paper presents the first results of a new comparative adult learning survey, that was conducted in five European countries in late 2024 and early 2025: (1) Germany, (2) the United Kingdom, (3) Czechia, (4) Italy and (5) Sweden. They represent not only different European regions but also various models of the capitalist economy (Hall, 2007; Hall & Thelen, 2009; Hall, 2018), welfare regimes (Béland et al., 2022), social investment regimes (Hemerijck, 2018; Hemerijck & Ronchi, 2022) and skill-formation regimes (Busemeyer, 2015; Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2012), which make them an optimal object for purposeful, contrastive, comparative analysis that can test the ability of the newly constructed instrument to map key aspects of ALS.
Our motivation for this new survey revolves around is to address shortcomings of existing international comparative data, derived from extensive EU and OECD surveys on lifelong learning, which can only reveal certain aspects of the current state of ALS.
Areas, that have been mapped by these surveys, and items that they have utilised, have been criticised within the field of adult education for both ontological (Ahl, 2006), theoretical (Rubenson, 2011, 2018) and methodological reasons (Boeren, 2016; Desjardins, 2011), as well as for their limits in formulating more nuanced and well-targeted policy recommendations (Desjardins, 2017; Schuller, 2019; Rubenson & Elfert, 2019).
We included five key thematic areas in the pilot survey that have been under-theorised in the previous surveys or have not been directly interlinked to a conception of ALS. These areas are integrated as transversal topics in the measurement of the educational biography of adults and their participation in FAE and NFE. The five areas are as follows: Flexibility of educational pathways within ALS, Openness of FAE for non-traditional learners, Reasons for participation in AET, Support for participation in AET, and Barriers to participation in AET.
Revisiting the Triadic Classification of Learning Activities: Rethinking their Measurement
Professor Ellen Boeren (University of Glasgow) - Presenting Author
Dr Jan Kalenda (Tomas Bata University in Zlin)
International organisations such as the European Commission (EC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have measured adult learning participation since the 1990s, using surveys like the Adult Education Survey (AES) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). These surveys employ a ‘triadic’ classification of learning activities—formal (FAE), non-formal (NFE), and informal learning (IFL)—to compare participation rates across countries. However, historical and conceptual advancements have highlighted that these categories often overlap, challenging their validity and reliability. Despite this, the triadic classification remains in use, raising concerns about the accuracy of participation data.
This presentation will critically examine the continued use of the triadic classification in leading surveys, arguing for a conceptual shift to better reflect the contemporary adult learning landscape. We will review the evolution of the triadic conceptualisation, particularly within the European Commission's Classification of Learning Activities (CLA), characterised by attributes on: Intention to learn, Organisation, Institutional framework and location, Hierarchy level-grade structure (“ladder”), Admission requirements, Registration requirements, Teaching/learning methods (predetermined/not flexible), Duration of at least one semester (minimum of 30 ECTS), Recognition of the programme by the relevant national education or equivalent authorities.
We will critique the practical application of the CLA in the recent AES 2022 survey through a matching of variable descriptors to the CLA attributes. Based on our critique, we will propose two alternative scenarios: (1) treating learning categories as fuzzy, overlapping concepts, and (2) conceptualising learning activities along a continuum of formality/informality. We will conclude by discussing the implications of these scenarios for future data collection and measurement practices, advocating for instruments that adapt to the evolving learning landscapes accelerated by the pandemic, for example the increased use of blended and online learning.
