The Participation Factors of Postgraduate Students

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This study investigated the factors influencing students' participation in a master's programme. The findings of this study suggested that the majority of the respondents were highly driven by physical and psychological factors with psychological factors ranked the highest. The study also sought to investigate the relationship between the demographic profiles of the respondents with the identified factors of participation. The findings suggest that age, and marital status as well as the university's reputation have an influence on the students' physical factors while the respondents' age and profession have an influence on the psychological and social factors. These findings confirm the discussions by Knowles (1990) and Rogers (2001) on the role of adult learners' characteristics in their learning process. Several implications were discussed and some suggestions were made based on the findings all of which aim to increase the participation of the adults in the postgraduate programmes.

Stream: Adult, Vocational, Tertiary and Professional Learning

Paper: , The Participation Factors of Postgraduate Students in Education

Faizah is a lecturer at the Education Faculty of Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. She has been teaching the English language for 15 years and has been seriously involved with the tertiary students for the past 11 years. She has keen interests in TESL and how adult learners learn the English language. This interests has led her into conducting various research on the adult learners. She has also experiences in presenting at both local and international conferences. She has written several articles and published a few in the local and international proceedings and journals.