The views of a professor of social work about her sabbatical leave overseas as a point of transition in her academic career, and as an occasion for challenge and reflection in her life and work, are presented. She left to escape the pressures of duties, obligations, strictures, and expectations that surround a relatively successful academic…

In its broadest context, play can be interpreted as any pleasurable use of discretionary time. Playfulness is an intrinsic feature of being human, and should be viewed in the light of a total lifestyle, not as an occurrence in an isolated time of life. Adult play appears to be an indefinable and controversial concept. A holistic approach should be…

Vocabulary test responses as traditionally scored were compared to these same responses when scored for finer nuances of understanding, as determined by the criterion of superior synonyms. Hypothesized the latter would be more related to age in a deficit pattern than the former. Results partly supported the hypothesis. (Author)

A study investigated what adults think about the nature of changes in reading ability across the life span. Subjects, 121 undergraduate students at two major midwestern universities and 24 non-faculty employees at one of these schools, were asked to list five or more skills which they thought were important for being a good reader at four…

Research on logical competence in adulthood was framed by the general competence-moderator-performance model of life span cognitive development constructed by Overton and his colleagues. This approach was able to distinguish between logical knowledge necessary for task solution and informational processes that may facilitate or inhibit the…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

This document provides the transcripts from the Congressional hearings on the Older Americans Health Education and Training Act. This act is to provide the necessary resources, leadership, and coordination: (1) to design a uniform, standardized program of health education and training for older Americans; (2) to directly involve educational…

The Career Development Inventory--Adult Form was used to measure career development, and three instruments were used to measure the life cycle or personal phasic development in order to seek a relationship between the adult life cycle and the professional career development cycle for women and men. Population for the study was a random sample of…

Major life developmental tasks are identified, along with the learning outcomes necessary to fulfill those tasks for adults from age 17 to retirement. Attention is directed to the important connection between life cycle change and adult learning as well as seven assumptions underlying life cycle theory. Developmental tasks and learning needs are…

This paper proposes a model, with experience as the key concept, which focuses on the continuity of changes throughout adulthood. It assumes that as people move through time, they continually make experiences, the quantity, range and content of which may vary across individuals. A distinction is suggested between the process of "making…

This annotated bibliography deals with many aspects of gerontology. In addition to a group of general works, there are sections on psychological characteristics, intervention, education, work and retirement, services, and living situations. Annotations are quite detailed, often listing findings of studies and summarizing the author's main…

The purpose of this study was to discover if there was a relationship in decisions made between adults and 11-year old students assumed to be at different levels of the formal operations stage in their responses to a situation calling for a moral judgment. (Author)

Burnout must be considered as symptomatic of a serious event in a person's life--a mid-life crisis, as it is widely termed. Numerous writings point out that during a period of life, roughly between the ages of 30 and 55, many people reach a crisis brought on by the realization that everyone's career, status, and life are measurable and limited.…

TWO TYPES OF LEARNING, EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC, ARE DESCRIBED. INTRINSIC LEARNING INVOLVES THOSE PROCESSES WHICH CAN HELP PEOPLE BECOME ALL THAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF BECOMING. INTRINSIC LEARNING IS THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF ALL EDUCATION, INCLUDING ADULT EDUCATION, AND IS ALSO THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF COUNSELING. SELF-ACTUALIZING PEOPLE LEARN THROUGH THE…

Changes in the perception of figural aftereffects occurring during adulthood were investigated with 56 female subjects. A significant linear trend analysis indicated that the magnitude of the figural aftereffects increased very slightly with age. This was supported by a significant T value which suggested a difference between the two extreme age…