How Adults Learn Differently Than Children, And What To Do For Best Results

Motivation Over Everything

First and foremost, the motivation to learn is much different between adults and children. Adults want to learn what they’re there to learn—provided they’re convinced of its immediate value to their lives. Once that intrinsic motivation is activated, all they really need is structure, guidance, interaction, and feedback. For them, learning often feels like training, focused on practical application and relevance. A good motivational framework for adults is Keller's ARCS: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction.

With kids, it’s a different story. Their motivation tends to be extrinsic, driven by a system of carrots and sticks. Because of this, they need scaffolding, engagement, and rewards to stay interested—creating a quasi-gamified environment. They thrive when tasks are challenging enough to require effort but not so difficult that they become discouraged. This concept aligns with what cognitive psychologists call "desirable difficulty," where the right level of challenge keeps learners engaged and promotes better retention.

Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is related but distinct. The ZPD refers to the range of tasks a learner can accomplish with guidance but cannot yet do independently. In contrast, desirable difficulty focuses on challenges learners can tackle independently, requiring effort to deepen understanding and improve long-term retention. While both concepts emphasize the importance of appropriate challenge, ZPD relies on external support, whereas desirable difficulty highlights individual effort.

Adults, being more self-regulated learners, benefit greatly from desirable difficulty—tasks that push them to recall, apply, or adapt their knowledge in challenging new ways. This effort not only deepens their understanding but also helps them integrate new information into their existing knowledge base, leading to better long-term retention and transfer of learning.

To put it simply: no matter your age, if you want to get somewhere and believe you can catch the bus, you will run for it. The key to motivating both adults and kids is meeting them where they are so we can guide them to where they need to go. The difference lies in their starting position.

A Primer on Schema Theory

The debate over how children learn versus how adults learn is ongoing, particularly between cognitivists and constructivists. However, one widely accepted theory is Schema Theory.

A "schema" refers to a cluster of information or concepts in the mind that helps us make sense of the world. For example, a schema for a horse might include attributes like 'large,' 'animal,' 'muscular,' 'fast,' 'long face,' 'work,' 'manure,' 'hooves,' 'fur,' 'tail,' and 'four legs.' It functions like an internal mind map that expands over time, becoming dense in some areas and thin in others.

When a schema is challenged by new information, we respond in one of three ways: we create new schemata to accommodate the information, alter existing schemata to assimilate it, or reject the information based on its abstractness or concreteness and how well it aligns with our values or beliefs.

For example, if we only had a schema for a horse and encountered a cow, we might initially think, "What a strange-looking horse." Upon learning that it’s a cow, we would create a new schema for "cow," noting shared characteristics with the "horse" schema. This process also expands our broader "animal" schema. Similarly, encountering a Shetland pony would likely lead us to update our existing "horse" schema rather than create a new one. Through these processes, our knowledge base grows, enabling us to make new associations and understand unfamiliar aspects of the world.

There are many types of schemata. The example above illustrates an "object" schema, but schemata can also organize information about social behaviors, self-concepts, physical processes, or events. Enything we think about is influenced by schemata or a lack therof, which play a significant role in how we learn and interpret new information.

So, How Do Adults and Children Differ When It Comes To Schema?

Here is where adults and children differ: Adults have an extensive network of schemata to draw upon when making sense of new information, while children have fewer schemata because they’ve had fewer experiences. Consequently, children often learn by creating new schemata, whereas adults primarily learn by adjusting or refining existing ones.

However, the more extensive and deeply ingrained a person’s schemata are, the harder it becomes to update them when they are conceptually inaccurate. In this sense, children are more cognitively flexible, while adults tend to be more rigid. For adults, prior experiences, values, and beliefs often take precedence over the accuracy or usefulness of new information. In contrast, children readily absorb new information because they are still in the process of forming their values and beliefs while creating new schemata.

This distinction also impacts the transfer of knowledge. Children may struggle to extend new knowledge to different contexts, as their schemata are still developing and less interconnected. Adults, on the other hand, may find it challenging to let go of outdated ideas or misinformation, even when confronted with new evidence. This dynamic is central to the expertise reversal effect: The same established schemata that help adults process familiar information efficiently can make it harder for them to adapt to new or conflicting information.

Implications for Teachers of Adult Learners

An adult learner's background is a powerful indicator of their existing schemata. The expertise reversal effect highlights how the needs of learners shift as they develop expertise. Instructional strategies that work well for children or novice learners—like step-by-step guidance or explicit examples—can frustrate adults with more experience, who may feel bogged down by details they already understand. For experienced learners, open-ended tasks, problem-solving opportunities, or discovery-based approaches are often more effective because they engage existing schemata without redundancy. Conversely, children benefit from clear scaffolding and explicit instruction, as their cognitive flexibility compensates for their lack of prior knowledge.

Because concrete examples are most effective in updating prior knowledge, examples must be numerous and varied when teaching a diverse group of adult learners. However, amount and variety alone are insufficient. The sequence in which concepts and examples are introduced, and how learners connect them, is critical. For instance, abstract concepts should be grounded in concrete examples before being refined into overarching ideas.

Often, instructors present abstract concepts first, followed by concrete or worked examples, and then design an activity to provide experiential context. While this approach seems intuitive, it is flawed. All learners—adults and children alike—form episodic memories before semantic ones. In other words, we absorb information through concrete experiences before processing it abstractly.

In practice, instructional design for adults must carefully balance respecting their expertise while challenging them to revise and refine their schemata. Overloading them with unnecessary guidance risks alienating them, while failing to challenge their existing knowledge can lead to stagnation. For children, the emphasis should be on creating rich, supportive environments that encourage schema creation and help them make meaningful connections between ideas.

The following is a recommended lesson plan for introducing new concepts to a diverse group of adult learners. This sequence activates prior knowledge, immediately applies it to deep processing (connecting disparate elements), and updates existing schemata with concrete yet novel information. Finally, it refines the updated schemata by distilling them into abstract concepts.

This approach allows students to integrate new concrete information into their existing knowledge base before reorganizing it into a more refined schema. They use what they already know to infer the nature of what they don’t yet understand. Only then, when the explicit abstract concepts are introduced, can they consciously connect the concrete to the abstract.

10 Step Lesson Plan for Adult Learners

This process can take place over a couple of days and is not a rigid prescription for all adult instruction. How something is taught depends heavily on what is being learned. For instance, the learning experience below exists at the intersection of the cognitive domain and the conceptual dimension of learning for adults with a large base of prior knowledge.

That said, each step of the sequence allows for flexibility, as several instructional methods can be tweaked and combined to align with insights from any needs analysis conducted prior to design or delivery. For example, how you facilitate discussions or present examples may require different approaches depending on variables such as the learning environment, class size, the technological tools available, or any cultural imperatives that call for due consideration.

I hope you find this useful in your efforts to create meaningful learning experiences which lead to an observable change in skills, knowledge, and attitudes.