Participant evaluation of adult residential conferences at the Donaldson Brown Continuing Education Center

The staff of the Donaldson Brown Continuing Education Center can benefit from the study in four ways: (1) The staff can gain information about the people who attend adult education programs. (2) The staff can obtain feedback on the quality and supportiveness of the Center facilities. (3) The program planning staff can determine the factors which are important for a successful conference. (4) The staff can gain information about the evaluation process which will provide the most useful information about the conferences.

Knowledge about the characteristics of the average attender can be useful during program planning sessions. The average participant of the Center's programs was about 40 years of age, had a technical degree, had attended about three prior conferences in the last two years, and attended this conference to obtain technical information and to update work skills.

The facilities of the Center were considered by the participants to be very conducive to adult learning and interaction. The Center staff is reinforced in their belief in the importance of comfortable lodging, ease, and coordination of registration, and helpfulness of the Center staff.

Continued attention should be given to the selection of the conference speakers and the program content. These factors are vital to conference success and participant satisfaction.

The Center's administrators became more aware of the need for several types of evaluative instruments which can be administered to different types of conferences. It is important that these instruments be carefully scrutinized and revised to ensure that they are providing the program planners with reliable information about the conferences.

For the purposes of this study, only the closed-ended items were analyzed. The responses to the open-ended items, however, did provide valuable information for the planning of future conferences.