An Examination of the Relationship of Gender, Marital Status, and Prior Educational Attainment and Learner Autonomy.

The development of a conceptual model that provides a theoretical framework for understanding the conative factors of desire, resourcefulness, initiative, and persistence in autonomous learning considered the related variables of gender, education level, age, and marital status. The relevance of these demographic variables is based on prior research in the area of self-directed learning that suggested additional consideration in the development of autonomous learning. The Learner Autonomy Profile (LAP), currently used to assess an individual’s level of personal autonomy, continues to accrue data on the identified demographic variables. This purpose of this paper is to present the finding of an analysis of the demographic data with the factors of autonomous learning (LAP scores) and discuss the implications for future research in adult learning theory.