Adult Education: Complete Journal Profile — History, Continuation, and Field Guide

Editorial honesty note: The directory record titled "Adult Education" (ISSN 0001-8481) refers to a historical journal published from 1950 to 1983. That title was continued as Adult Education Quarterly, which is the living journal carrying the lineage forward today, published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE). This profile documents the original title's history and then profiles its continuation in full, so that readers encountering either name — in citations, library catalogs, or this directory — understand exactly what they are looking at.

Journal at a Glance: The Original Title

• Full title: Adult Education
• ISO 4 abbreviation: Adult Educ. (Paperpile-attributed)
• Print ISSN: 0001-8481 (ISSN-L 0001-8481; ACNP)
• NLM catalog: 9877760 (Paperpile-attributed)
• Publication run: Vol. 1, no. 1 (October 1950) – Vol. 33, no. 2 (winter 1983)
• Frequency: Quarterly
• Language: English
• Country: United States
• Publishers: American Association for Adult Education and the Department of Adult Education of the National Education Association (1950–1983, Cleveland, Ohio); later the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
• Dewey classification: 374.05 (ACNP)
• Continued as: Adult Education Quarterly

Founding and Early History

Adult Education was established in 1950, a moment when adult education in the United States was professionalizing rapidly. The postwar years had expanded university extension programs, the GI Bill had brought millions of adults into higher education, and practitioners sought a scholarly venue for research on how adults learn. The journal was launched jointly by the American Association for Adult Education and the Department of Adult Education of the National Education Association of the United States, with initial publication from Cleveland, Ohio.

For thirty-three years and thirty-three volumes, the journal served as a principal American outlet for scholarship on adult learning. Its pages carried the research of a field defining itself: studies of adult learners' motivations and barriers, program design and evaluation, the emerging methodology of survey and field research in non-traditional educational settings, and theoretical work on the distinctive characteristics of adult learning as opposed to childhood pedagogy.

The 1983 Transition

With Volume 33, number 2 (winter 1983), the title Adult Education ceased under that name. Publication continued under the new title Adult Education Quarterly, published for the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. The Italian periodicals catalogue (ACNP) records the run as 1950–1983 with cumulative holdings 1953–1983, and Wikipedia records "Adult Education" as the former name of Adult Education Quarterly, with the journal's history given as 1950–present. In bibliographic terms, this is a title change with continuity of volume numbering and institutional sponsorship — the standard pattern by which long-lived journals evolve.

The practical consequence for researchers: citations from 1950 through 1983 will appear under "Adult Education" (ISSN 0001-8481), while citations from 1984 onward appear under "Adult Education Quarterly" (ISSN 0741-7136 print, 1552-3047 online). Library catalogs link the two records as preceding/succeeding titles.

Adult Education Quarterly: The Continuing Journal

Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of adult and continuing education. It is published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) in the United States. Its history is given as 1950–present, reflecting continuity with the original Adult Education title.

Scope and Mission

AEQ describes itself as a scholarly refereed journal committed to advancing the understanding and practice of adult and continuing education. It aims to be inclusive in scope, addressing topics and issues of significance to scholars and practitioners concerned with diverse aspects of adult and continuing education. It publishes research employing a wide variety of methods and approaches — including survey research, experimental designs, case studies, ethnographic observations and interviews, grounded theory, phenomenology, historical investigations, and narrative inquiry — as well as articles addressing theoretical and philosophical issues pertinent to the field. (Scope description paraphrased from the journal's stated aims via Resurchify.)

Identifiers

• Print ISSN: 0741-7136 (Wikipedia)
• Web ISSN: 1552-3047 (Wikipedia)
• ISO 4 abbreviation: Adult Educ. Q. (Wikipedia/ResearchBite)
• LCCN: 84642128 (Wikipedia-attributed)
• OCLC: 9406042 (Wikipedia-attributed)
• Frequency: Quarterly

Editorial Leadership

As of 2019, the editors-in-chief were Ellen Boeren (University of Glasgow), Kevin M. Roessger (University of Arkansas), and Elizabeth A. Roumell (Texas A&M University) (Wikipedia-attributed). Editorial teams rotate, so the current masthead should be verified on the journal's official SAGE page.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus, ERIC, EBSCO databases, ProQuest databases, and the Social Sciences Citation Index (Wikipedia-attributed). This indexing profile gives it strong discoverability in both education-specific (ERIC) and general (Scopus, Web of Science) discovery systems.

Metrics (Attributed Snapshots)

• Journal Impact Factor: 1.968 for 2020 (Journal Citation Reports, Wikipedia-attributed), ranking 96th of 238 journals in "Education & Educational Research."
• Impact score: 2.27 for 2024, with an 11-year average of 1.88 (Resurchify-attributed).
• SJR: 0.502 for 2025 (Resurchify-attributed); 0.480 in another snapshot (ResearchBite-attributed).
• H-index: 59 (Resurchify-attributed).
• Best quartile: Q2 in Education (Resurchify-attributed); Q2/Q3 placements vary by category and year.
• Coverage: 1950–2025 in Scopus (Resurchify-attributed), reflecting the title's continuity.

The Association Behind the Journal: AAACE

The American Association for Adult and Continuing Education is an international association of adult educators whose members, though practicing in many fields and countries, share the conviction that lifelong learning contributes to human fulfillment and positive social change. Its stated mission is to provide leadership for the field by expanding opportunities for adult growth and development, unifying adult educators, fostering the development and dissemination of theory, research, information, and best practices, promoting professional identity and standards, and advocating relevant public policy and social-change initiatives. AAACE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. The association also publishes Adult Learning, a quarterly practice-oriented journal (SAGE, on behalf of AAACE, since 1989; ISSN 1045-1595 print, 2162-4070 web), aimed at practitioners and researchers who design, manage, teach, and evaluate programs for adult learners.

Related Journals in the Field

Readers navigating adult-education publishing should distinguish several related SAGE titles:

• Adult Education Quarterly — the continuation of Adult Education; the flagship research journal of AAACE (ISSN 0741-7136 / 1552-3047).
• Adult Learning — AAACE's practice-oriented quarterly, publishing empirical research and conceptual papers with a problem-solving emphasis for practitioners (ISSN 1045-1595 / 2162-4070; 1989–present; indexed in Scopus, ERIC, EBSCO, ProQuest).
• Journal of Adult and Continuing Education — a SAGE title (ISSN 1477-9714 / 1479-7194) providing a forum for theoretical and practical work in lifelong learning and adult, community, and continuing education, published twice a year; coverage recorded 2014, 2016–2025 (directory-attributed).

The Field: What Adult Education Research Covers

Adult education as a research field studies how adults learn across the lifespan and in diverse settings: workplaces, community programs, higher education, health education, and civic life. Foundational concerns include the distinctive characteristics of adult learners — their accumulated experience, self-direction, and practical orientation — and the barriers they face, from time and cost to institutional inflexibility. Research methods span the full methodological spectrum, as AEQ's scope indicates: quantitative surveys and experiments, qualitative case studies and ethnography, historical inquiry, and philosophical analysis.

Contemporary threads include workforce development and reskilling, adult literacy and numeracy, health literacy, civic and democratic education, the education of older adults, migration and integration, digital and distance learning for adults, and the policy frameworks — from national skills strategies to UNESCO's lifelong-learning agenda — that shape provision. The field's journals, with AEQ among the most established, are where these conversations are documented and advanced.

Why This Historical Record Matters

A directory entry for a ceased title may seem of purely archival interest, but it serves real functions. First, citation integrity: thousands of citations in the literature reference "Adult Education" with ISSN 0001-8481, and researchers encountering those citations need to know what journal they denote and where its content now lives. Second, field history: the 1950–1983 run documents the formative decades of adult education as a discipline, and the title change itself marks the field's institutional evolution from the American Association for Adult Education to AAACE. Third, catalog accuracy: library systems maintain preceding/succeeding title links, and a directory that conflates the historical title with its successor — or worse, presents the 1950–1983 title as a currently publishing journal — misleads users.

This profile therefore treats the record as what it is: a historical title with a living continuation, and documents both.

Landmark Intellectual Currents in the Title's Lifetime

The 1950–1983 run of Adult Education coincided with the decades in which adult learning theory took its modern shape, and the journal was one of the venues where these developments were debated:

• Andragogy: Malcolm Knowles's formulation of andragogy — the art and science of helping adults learn — gave the field its most influential framework, positing that adult learners are self-directed, bring rich experience to learning situations, are ready to learn what their social roles demand, are problem-centered rather than subject-centered, and are motivated more by internal than external factors. Whether or not one accepts andragogy as a full theory, its vocabulary permeates the literature of the period.
• Critical and liberatory traditions: Paulo Freire's work on conscientization and dialogical education, though rooted in Brazilian literacy campaigns, profoundly influenced North American adult educators in the 1970s, pushing the field toward questions of power, oppression, and education's role in social transformation.
• Transformative learning: Jack Mezirow's theory of perspective transformation, emerging in the late 1970s from studies of women returning to higher education, proposed that significant adult learning involves critically examining the assumptions underlying one's beliefs — a framework that generated decades of subsequent research.
• Self-directed learning: Research by Allen Tough and others on adults' self-planned learning projects documented how much adult learning happens outside formal programs, reshaping how educators thought about their role.
• Program planning and evaluation: Alongside theory, the journal's era saw the development of systematic approaches to planning, administering, and evaluating adult education programs — the professional knowledge base for practitioners.

These currents did not merely appear in the journal; the journal was part of the infrastructure through which they circulated, were critiqued, and were refined.

Working with Historical Journal Literature

Researchers using the 1950–1983 archive should keep several practical points in mind. First, terminology has shifted: concepts now discussed as "lifelong learning," "workforce development," or "health literacy" appear under older labels, and keyword searching benefits from consulting period thesauri such as the ERIC thesaurus's historical terms. Second, the archive predates digital submission, so early volumes may have less standardized citation practice; verifying references may require consulting print holdings. Third, the title change means citation databases sometimes split the publication history: a complete literature search on a topic spanning the transition must query both "Adult Education" and "Adult Education Quarterly," ideally linked by ISSN (0001-8481 and 0741-7136/1552-3047).

For systematic reviews in adult education, the combined 1950–present run of this title lineage is one of the longest continuous publication records in the field, making it a valuable source for tracing how research questions, methods, and theoretical commitments have evolved over more than seven decades.

For Librarians: Cataloging the Title Change

Cataloguers handle this title as a classic preceding/succeeding pair. The earlier record: Adult Education, ISSN 0001-8481 (ISSN-L), quarterly, 1950–1983, Vol. 1 no. 1 (Oct. 1950) through Vol. 33 no. 2 (winter 1983), published successively by the American Association for Adult Education with the NEA Department of Adult Education and later by AAACE. The succeeding record: Adult Education Quarterly, ISSN 0741-7136 (print) / 1552-3047 (online), quarterly, 1984–present, SAGE Publications on behalf of AAACE. Authority records (ACNP journal code 44950; NLM catalog 9877760 for the earlier title) support the linkage. Holdings statements should reflect the 1983/1984 break, and discovery layers should surface both titles for searches on either name.

The Association Ecosystem: Conferences and Recognition

The journal does not exist in isolation; it is embedded in AAACE's professional ecosystem. The association's annual conference is the field's principal gathering: reporting on the 68th annual conference described approximately 200 papers presented by some 400 attendees, with contributions classified across 26 areas of practice ranging from adult basic education and colleges/universities to distance learning, military education, health, workforce development, disability, and minority issues. Papers span research-based contributions and practice formats, mirroring the journal's own inclusive scope. Many conference presentations mature into journal submissions, making the conference program a leading indicator of the topics AEQ will publish in subsequent years.

AAACE also confers annual awards recognizing exemplary contributions to adult and continuing education — a highly visible statement of the field's standards of excellence. Award categories have included outstanding adult education program, outstanding literature in adult education, and recognition for community, minority, and non-formal learning, alongside honors for leadership, service, knowledge, learners, and practice. For authors, these awards signal the kinds of contribution the field values most; for readers, award-winning works offer an entry point into the literature's highlights.

Submitting to Adult Education Quarterly Today

Prospective authors should approach AEQ as a broad-scope, methodologically pluralist journal. The scope explicitly welcomes survey research, experimental designs, case studies, ethnographic work, grounded theory, phenomenology, historical investigation, and narrative inquiry, as well as theoretical and philosophical pieces. This pluralism means fit is judged less by method than by the significance of the question for adult and continuing education as a field. Authors should consult the current author guidelines on the journal's official SAGE page for manuscript preparation requirements, and should verify the current editorial team, since editorships rotate. Given the journal's indexing in SSCI, Scopus, and ERIC, publication here carries strong visibility within education research. Early-career scholars should note that the journal values both empirical rigor and theoretical contribution, so framing a study within the field's ongoing conversations — about equity, access, and the purposes of adult learning — strengthens a submission considerably.

About This Directory Record

Record-status note: This directory entry ("adult-education") carries the ISSN 0001-8481, which bibliographic authorities (ACNP, NLM catalog) assign to Adult Education (1950–1983), the predecessor of Adult Education Quarterly. It should not be presented as a currently publishing standalone journal under that name. Readers seeking the current journal should consult Adult Education Quarterly (ISSN 0741-7136 / 1552-3047), published by SAGE on behalf of AAACE. If this directory also holds a separate record for Adult Education Quarterly, the two records should be cross-linked as preceding/succeeding titles.

What Could Not Be Verified

The complete editorial roster of the original 1950–1983 title; its peer-review practices in detail; circulation and subscription figures; the exact circumstances and dating of the publisher transitions within the 1950–1983 run; current editors-in-chief of Adult Education Quarterly beyond the 2019-attributed team; current-year metrics for AEQ beyond attributed snapshots; and AEQ's current APC, acceptance rate, and turnaround time. Verify current details on the journal's official SAGE page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is "Adult Education" still published?

Not under that title. It ran from 1950 to 1983 (ISSN 0001-8481) and was continued as Adult Education Quarterly, which publishes today.

Who publishes Adult Education Quarterly?

SAGE Publications, on behalf of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE).

What are the ISSNs?

Adult Education (1950–1983): 0001-8481. Adult Education Quarterly: 0741-7136 (print), 1552-3047 (web).

Where is it indexed?

Adult Education Quarterly is indexed in Scopus, ERIC, EBSCO, ProQuest, and the Social Sciences Citation Index (Wikipedia-attributed).

What is its impact factor?

1.968 for 2020 per Journal Citation Reports (Wikipedia-attributed); an impact score of 2.27 for 2024 (Resurchify-attributed). Check current sources for the latest figures.

Sources Consulted

ACNP Italian Periodicals Catalogue (publication history, ISSN, publishers, Dewey class), Paperpile journal-abbreviation record (ISO 4 abbreviation, NLM catalog number), Wikipedia entries for Adult Education Quarterly and Adult Learning (history, publisher, editors, indexing, metrics — attributed), ERIC record EJ446788 (ISSN confirmation in citation context), Resurchify and ResearchBite (AEQ metrics — attributed), AAACE mission materials via conference reporting (CRADALL/ymaws), Muck Rack (Journal of Adult and Continuing Education description).