Researchers warn: Lecture-based courses don’t work for older adults

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Learning later in life isn’t just possible, it is important for good quality of life. It can boost memory, emotional well-being, and even a sense of purpose. A new study shows that older adults learn best when they’re taught the same way that is best for younger people, with active participation, meaningful discussions, and material that feels relevant to their lives. The findings emphasize that the common method of lecture-based learning does not fit older adults’ characteristics because it requires good memory and often feels irrelevant.   This new research builds on an earlier study, led by the same team, which found that older women actually learned better as they got older. Based on interviews with nineteen women in the “third age”, that study showed that, in contrast to common stereotypes, they felt they were learning better than at any earlier time in their lives, and it also explained what made this later-life learning especially effective. Primarily, they reported better understanding, because they can connect new knowledge to previous knowledge and experiences. The results challenged common assumptions about aging and showed that the right learning conditions can help older adults thrive.

As societies around the world grow older, the demand for effective lifelong learning is increasing. In a new paper published in Educational Gerontology, Prof. Anat Zohar of the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Yochai Z. Shavit of the Stanford Center on Longevity offer a new way of thinking about education for older adults.

Their article shows that the same principles that help children and young adults learn deeply – active learning, connecting new ideas to things we already know, meaningful tasks, and learning with and from others – are just as important, if not more so,  for older learners.

Although programs for older adults have become more common, many rely heavily on passive learning  rather than on research-based methods. An enormous industry, worth many millions of dollars per year, consists of courses for older adults based primarily on lectures, despite growing evidence that this approach is not suited to their needs.

“We’re teaching older adults the wrong way,” says Prof. Anat Zohar. “The dominant model is still the lecture, but it is built on assumptions that simply don’t hold for older learners. First, it relies heavily on memorization, even though memory is the very ability that tends to decline with age. Second, it doesn’t connect new ideas to the rich knowledge and life experience older adults already have—one of their greatest learning resources. And third, lectures rarely create the meaningful, relevant learning and relationships that drive motivation in later life. Despite the large industry built around them, lectures just don’t work pedagogically. Older adults enjoy attending them, but they don’t retain enough. High-quality, active learning can support cognitive abilities, promote health, and even contribute to longer lives.”

This “lecture industry” is part of a much larger market. In the United States alone, the broader continuing education sector, which includes post-school courses, adult programs, vocational training and professional development, was estimated at about USD 66.9 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow to around USD 96 billion by 2030. Yet a significant portion of this money is still invested in traditional lecture formats that are not aligned with how older adults learn best.

The researchers argue that older adulthood is a rich and meaningful stage of life, and education can help people stay mentally sharp, emotionally fulfilled, and socially connected.

Dr. Shavit notes: “Older adulthood is a time of real psychological depth. When education taps into older adults’ motivations, like the search for meaning, connection, and self-understanding, it becomes not just effective, but deeply rewarding.”

By connecting what we know about how people learn at any age with the specific needs of older adults, Zohar and Shavit offer a practical framework for creating learning environments that work for everyone.

Their main message is simple: older adults deserve to be taught in a way that will fulfil their learning needs. They are not a separate group with completely different learning rules. They are part of the continuous story of human learning, and education should treat them that way.

This article is based on a previous article: Zohar, A. (2023). Cognitive growth rather than decline: examining highly educated, third age women’s learning. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 42(4), 342-360.   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02601370.2023.2215951

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Journal

Educational Gerontology

DOI

10.1080/03601277.2025.2569386 

Method of Research

Content analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Bridging geragogy and pedagogy: Towards a learning-sciences-based approach to older adults’ education

Study explores the link between newspaper preference and attitudes towards autism

City St George’s, University of London

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A new study from City St George’s, University of London has found that people’s newspaper reading habits are a reliable predictor of their attitudes towards autism, even when many other factors such as age, education, political views and personal experiences are taken into account.

The research, published in the journal Autism, reveals that around 10% of the differences in automatic, unconscious bias were linked to what newspapers people read. People who read right-leaning tabloid papers more often showed stronger negative automatic biases towards autism.

By using an innovative analytical approach, the study introduces a new way to understand how media and audiences can shape one another, and it underlines the importance of media literacy, as participants who trusted newspapers uncritically tended to have less accurate knowledge about autism.

What the study did

The study builds on earlier work by the group – led by Dr Themis Karaminis, lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at City St George’s – which analysed 24,000 British newspaper pieces and showed that autistic people are portrayed in newspapers predominantly using stereotypes and negative language. This was especially true in some right-leaning and tabloid newspapers, which also mentioned autism less often than left-leaning broadsheets.

To find out more about how newspaper preference influenced autism attitudes, the authors surveyed 277 non-autistic adults based in the UK. Participants reported how often they read ten major British newspapers – Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Sun, and The Times – and how much they trusted each one.

Participants also completed questionnaires assessing their knowledge about autism and their explicit attitudes towards autistic people. Finally, they took part in a word-based task designed to reveal automatic and less conscious biases and associations about autism. Information on age, gender, education, political leanings and contact with autistic people was also provided. The authors analysed the data using a novel analytical approach that enabled them to separate out the influence of media from these other factors.

What you read and trust matters

The study found clear links between reading habits and people’s attitudes, particularly their automatic and less conscious biases assessed with the word-based task. Around 10% of the differences in these biases were linked to participants’ newspaper reading habits.

1. People who frequently read right-leaning tabloids were more likely to show negative automatic biases towards autism, which is consistent with the more negative coverage of autism in this part of the press.
2. But some of the readers who trusted these same outlets reported relatively positive explicit attitudes about autism in the questionnaires. This mismatch could suggest that even when people consciously reject stereotypes, they might hold negative biases related to their reading preferences.
3. Finally, people who expressed higher trust in newspapers tended to have less accurate knowledge about autism, suggesting they may be less inclined to question or cross-check the information they encounter.

Dr Karaminis, senior author of the study, said:

“The new study is an early step in teasing apart the many factors that relate to how the public thinks about autism, and in understanding how media fit within a wider landscape of social influences that hinder acceptance of autistic people and affect their mental wellbeing.

“The findings highlight that newspaper reading habits are a robust predictor of public attitudes—at least in the context of autism—even when many other factors are taken into account. This is significant in an era where public awareness about neurodiversity is growing, yet misleading or sensationalised stories, such as unfounded claims linking autism to common medicines, continue to make headlines.”

The findings also informed written evidence submitted to the House of Lords Committee on the Autism Act 2009 and included in the Committee’s final report, Time to Deliver: The Autism Act 2009 and the New Autism Strategy, published in November 2025.

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Journal

Autism

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Publication Date

9-Dec-2025

 

Helical pulses – flying electromagnetic conches – were observed

Light Publishing Center, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics And Physics, CAS

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image: 

Figure 1：Schematic of the generation of optical and microwave helical pulses.

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Credit: Yijie Shen et al.

An international research team from China, Singapore, and Spain has reported the first experimental observation of helical electromagnetic pulses, a long sought form of light that twists through both space and time. Unlike conventional vortex beams, which spiral only in their spatial structure, helical pulses are single cycle wave packets whose field patterns rotate simultaneously in space and time.

 

The concept of helical pulses was introduced in theoretical works more than twenty years ago, but practical generation was considered extremely challenging due to the need for extreme bandwidth and precise space time coupling. The new work overcomes these barriers by developing two independent experimental routes that operate in very different frequency regimes.

 

In the optical domain, the researchers generated the pulses by starting from a structured parent waveform known as a toroidal pulse and then separating its internal chiral components through polarization control. Using ultrashort laser sources, metasurfaces, and polarization optics, they isolated a nearly linearly polarized helical pulse and directly visualized its characteristic twisting field through diffraction based measurements. The results reveal strong space time nonseparability and a clear three dimensional helical field structure.

 

In the microwave domain, the team created helical pulses by directly radiating them from a specially designed ultrawideband dual arm spiral antenna. Unlike conventional antennas, which tend to destroy delicate topological structures, the new antenna was engineered without a metallic backing and was driven by precisely tailored time domain signals. This approach produced true single cycle helical pulses whose fields display a three dimensional structure with intertwined transverse and longitudinal components. Experimental measurements, numerical simulations, and analytical theory show excellent agreement.

 

This achievement represents the first direct experimental confirmation of a class of electromagnetic solutions that previously existed only in theory. By showing that light and microwaves can be shaped into space time twisted, single cycle pulses, the work provides a new platform for future technologies, including ultrahigh speed communications, robust information encoding, precision imaging, particle manipulation, and the study of topological electromagnetic fields across a wide range of frequencies.

Figure 2：Spatiotemporal structure and propagation of helical pulses.

Credit

Yijie Shen et al.

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-65916-4 

Article Title

Observation of helical pulses

 

New study: Despite global linguistic diversity, grammar often shares similar structures

Findings are published in Nature Human Behaviour

Saarland University

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image: 

The team, led by Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University (photo) and Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has examined around 1,700 languages to identify structures that might occur universally.

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Credit: Thorsten Mohr/UdS

A team of researchers from Saarbrücken and Leipzig has examined around 1,700 languages to identify structures that might occur universally. Of 191 grammatical patterns – known as linguistic universals – one third were found to be present in the languages studied. The team, led by Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University and Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has published its findings in Nature Human Behaviour.

Natural languages follow certain patterns. To facilitate the analysis and comparison of these patterns, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig made the world’s largest database of grammatical features publicly available two years ago. This database, known as ‘Grambank’, was developed with contributions from over a hundred linguists worldwide and provides the foundation for the current study on shared characteristics among languages. ‘We used several highly complex statistical methods to analyse the Grambank data in order to identify which of the 191 hypothesized linguistic universals were consistently observed across all languages,’ explains Annemarie Verkerk, Junior Professor of Language Science at Saarland University. By using a variety of statistical approaches, the research team was able to achieve a level of statistical precision far beyond that offered by earlier studies.

‘Up until now, linguists have typically focused on languages that are geographically distant from one another to avoid excessive similarities within the same language family – for example, comparing Slavic languages not only with other Indo-European languages such as Italian and Romanian, but also with languages from, say, the Turkic or Afro-Asiatic language families,’ Verkerk notes. However, many of these previous studies not only restricted themselves to comparisons between a limited number of languages – resulting in reduced statistical significance – they also paid little attention to language history. ‘Our methods allow us to trace how languages have evolved over time and how they relate geographically to others. By making use of a kind of family tree for each individual language, we were able to exploit inter-language relationships to estimate how linguistic universals arise,’ explains Annemarie Verkerk.

Analyses from multiple perspectives confirmed that roughly one third of the 191 proposed universals appear as recurring patterns across all languages. ‘This is a clear indication that language evolution is not random. That’s why we need to continue studying language change to understand why so many languages share similar underlying grammatical structures. It seems very likely that there are deeply rooted principles governing how effective human communication systems are constructed,’ says Verkerk.

As an example of a language universal, Verkerk cites word order in sentences – whether verbs precede or follow objects and how this relates to other recurring patterns. In German, verbs typically precede the object, while in Japanese the reverse is true. A related feature is the order of adpositions and nouns. Adpositions are linking words that express a spatial or temporal relationship between a noun and other words or phrases in a sentence. German, for example, uses prepositions, which come before a noun or noun phrase, whereas Japanese uses postpositions, which come after a noun or noun phrase. The correlation between object–verb order and postpositions, as observed in Japanese, is among the strongest universals identified in the study. ‘Using Bayesian statistics, we calculated the probability that these universals can be recognized as grammatical patterns across different languages,’ explains Verkerk.

Verkerk‘s research colleague and a co-author of the study Russell Gray of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig explains how the team chose to present their results: ‘We debated whether we should present the findings as a “glass half-empty scenario” or as a “glass half-full”. Should we emphasize how many of the proposed universals lack robust statistical support, or should we highlight the solid evidence that we found for about a third of them?’ ‘Ultimately,’ says Gray, ‘we chose to focus on the recurring patterns and to demonstrate that human languages tend towards a limited set of preferred grammatical solutions, shaped by shared cognitive and communicative constraints.’

For future research in this field, Annemarie Verkerk recommends moving away from small samples of individual languages, focusing instead on large cross-linguistic datasets: ‘Future studies should not simply analyse dependencies between features appearing in multiple language systems, they should also consider how human languages have changed over time and which social, ecological and demographic factors have influenced their development.’

Original publication:

Annemarie Verkerk, Olena Shcherbakova, Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård, Christoph Rzymski, Quentin D. Atkinson, Simon J. Greenhill & Russell D. Gray: Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses, erschienen in “Nature Human Behaviour”:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02325-z

Research briefing ‘Shared universal pressures in the evolution of human languages’:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02355-7

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-025-02325-z 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses