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Nontraditional Age Students
Many nontraditional age students lack confidence and feel uncomfortable in a college environment that is still predominantly populated by young adults. Instructors can help nontraditional age students by offering positive feedback as often as they can, by avoiding comparing students, and by avoiding putting adult learners "on the spot," in drawing attention to their age or directly calling on them to contribute when they do not volunteer.
Nontraditional age learners, even more than younger students, feel the need for learning to be relevant to their life experiences. They are more likely than younger students to question the importance of a given assignment or body of information (although they may not make their reservations known, because they may lack confidence). They are also more eager to make contributions based on their personal experiences and to use these experiences as the basis for argument in papers and other assignments. Instructors can enlist the support and enthusiasm of older learners, explaining the relevance of assignments and class activities to the course whenever possible. They can also provide opportunities for older students to draw on their experiences and incorporate new learning through lenses that are provided by past experiences, in the process helping students learn to derive abstract ideas from these experiences.
Adult learners' personal responsibilities are often more complicated than those of traditional age learners. They may have a child in the hospital, a major report due at their office, or a leaking roof to fix at the same time as a term paper is due. Often, they make large sacrifices to attend college and are spreading their effort over many different life tasks. Instructors can try to understand their situations and exercise whatever flexibility they can in helping nontraditional age learners to be successful.
Especially with much older nontraditional age learners, physical limitations such as poor vision, hearing loss, or diminished memory can impair learning. Time limits and reliance on a single mode of teaching, such as lecture, constrain opportunities for these older students. Instructors can vary the stimuli (using visual as well as auditory approaches) and make whatever allowances for time and recall that they judge possible and fair in the situation.
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