Laurie Sanders
Evaluating Service Learning’s Impact on Student Participants

Methodology

Collecting data from local service organizations, using UA undergraduates as cata collectors, who taught adolescent or at-risk parents about child development and other skills. Research will either be on the effects of this service learning project on the student data collectors, the organizations, the populations served, and/or the mentor/student relationship. May concentrate solely on the service learning project itself: What are the positive and negative outcomes associated with university service learning on the students’ attitudes towards further community service.

Try looking at the Survey of Student Engagement at http://nsse.iub.edu/html/quick_facts.cfm

I’ve emailed the NSSE this inquiry:

Dear NSSE staff,
I am inquiring about using the NSSE Survey of Student Engagement in local data collection efforts here at the University of Akron.
Part of what I am interested in is gathering data in support of my department's degree requirement that students perform service learning. Of course, we believe the experience has many positive outcomes for students, and we'd like to begin making a data dcriven argument that it does.

In order to compare our data to the national findings, we'd need to better understand NSSE's coding of the quesitonnaire, if you could supply that for us in codebook format. This is just an initial inquiry in advance of asking my Institutional Review Board for permission to begin data collection.
Looking forward to any suggestions you may have for us.
Thanks

David Witt
School of Family and Consumer Sciences
The University of Akron

Measurement and Operationalization
First, you need to formally state Research Questions or Hypotheses

All of these seem to be yes or no questions.
What factors influence faculty use of service learning in their classrooms based on variables such as:

Is service learning emphasized at the university? What do you mean by emphasize?
Is there a service learning center at the university to aid in the process of bringing the university into community service? Searching on service learning through the university's main page might give you a hint, but this is just a place to start
Is service learning efforts in the classroom part of the rewards system for faculty? What do faculty actually get rewards for?
Are service learning efforts taken into consideration as a basis for promotion or tenure? Take a look at RTP guidelines
Have these faculty members participated in service learning in the past?
What are their reactions to the experience?
Was it positive or negative?
Are they unsure of how to implement service learning into their curriculum?You'd be better off taking one or two and measuring the extent to which it is true - so you need a measure of some kind.
Thinking like a social scientist, you'd want to ask things you can measure.
What are the incentives and decentives for faculty to involve themselves in a service learning project

Hypothesis:
Faculty who have positive attitudes towards service learning will result in their students having more positive experiences in their service learning endeavors.
Faculty members who have negative attitudes towards service learning, and only implement it as a program requirement or requirement for tenure or promotion, will result in their students not benefiting to as high of a degree as students with professors that lead them in service learning with a positive outlook and attitude about the experience as being beneficial.

You'll need to measure these things somehow - how will you know which students had which instructors for their project?
... and how might you measure student benefit (see the NSSE above)

There are many self-efficacy scales to measure students’ perceptions of their performance in service learning. I will definitely need to use some type of questionnaire with a scale on it that measures faculty attitudes towards service learning in order to see the differences between those that are forced to use service learning and those who do it voluntarily for the benefit of their students. I will also need a measure for students’ outcomes from their service learning experiences in order to compare the differences between students who have professors with a positive attitude versus professors who have an indifferent or negative attitude. I also plan to include my own observations if possible.