Adult education occurs whenever individuals engage in sustained, systematic learning in order to affect changes in their attitudes, knowledge, skills or belief systems. Learning, instruction and developmental processes are the primary foci of educational psychology research and theorizing, but educational psychologists' work in these domains has centred primarily on the childhood and adolescent school years. More recently, a number of educational psychologists have studied learning and development in adulthood. These efforts have resulted in what is termed "adult educational psychology". The purpose of this volume is to introduce this subfield of educational psychology. The first section focuses on the interplay between learning and development in adulthood, how various forms of instruction lead to different learning outcomes for adults, descriptions of the diverse social contexts in which adult learning takes place, and the development of metacognitive knowledge across the life-span. The second section describes both research and theory pertaining to adult intellectual functioning, thinking and problem-solving skills within various contexts. The third section describes research in a variety of adult learning domains; discusses the cognitive and behavioural dimensions of reading in adulthood and the applications of reading in real-life circumstances; examines an educational intervention developed to promote forgiveness; and relates the outcomes of an intervention designed to educate parents about their children's mathematics learning. The final section summarizes the themes and issues running throughout the text.