In our diverse and interconnected world, expanding students' horizons beyond the classrooms and laboratories of home campuses is increasingly important. Even some of the brightest honors students remain naïve to the causes and ramifications of current world events and lack the necessary intercultural skills to become effective ethical leaders with…

A university course project was developed and implemented in a biology course, focusing on environmental problems, to assess community awareness of childhood lead poisoning. A set of 385 questionnaires was generated and distributed in an urban community in North Carolina, USA. The completed questionnaires were sorted first into yes and no sets…

Pre-service elementary education teachers conducted family nights with children and families considered "high need". The family nights were designed to help build preservice teachers' sense of self-efficacy regarding parent involvement and working with low-income children and families with limited English proficiency. The project…

The mission of Minding Our Business (MOB), a service-learning course started in 1997 to meet community needs, is to advance the personal and vocational development of urban youth through entrepreneurship education and mentoring. This paper evaluates the long-term impact of MOB on the personal and vocational development of the alumni mentors…

For a university service learning educational research project addressing Legionnaires' disease (LD), a Yes/No questionnaire on community awareness of LD was developed and distributed in an urban community in North Carolina, USA. The 456 questionnaires completed by the participants were sorted into yes and no sets based on responses obtained to…

The service learning immersion experience in Central America benefitted preservice teachers, which resulted in a collaborative project on the analysis of languages spoken at the primary to middle school level. This study researches, collects data, and analyzes results from one school system in the country of Nicaragua in hopes of acquiring…

This evaluation study provides descriptive information about the implementation and outcomes of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) program in West Virginia, from September 2012 through May 2013. The report draws on information from online surveys of directors of 30 CCLC programs and from school teachers for 4,102 participating…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate final projects in a freshman leadership course (combining grounding in leadership theories with a service-learning component) to determine what students learned about leadership, themselves as developing leaders, and leading in the civic community, and how deeply they learned these concepts. Students found…

Service-learning is promoted widely by professional organizations (NCSS, 2001), but often with little reflection on the nature of meaningful student participation and the impact of teacher leadership styles. The authors studied mixed-age "small school" advisory groups involved in service-learning at one elementary school; observational, interview,…

This study of Dickinson College represents an unusually complete, detailed, and balanced study of the local and regional economic impact of an academic institution. Among other features, it includes estimates of the college's positive and negative effects on local government, local as well as county wide economic impact estimates, and a relatively…

Current approaches and trends in writing pedagogy within the composition classroom focus on the development of students' identities through personal, cultural, or disciplinary processes. By employing writing assignments and activities that concentrate on developing certain traits or characteristics of students' identities has led to a "crisis"…

The current study sought to determine if community based gardening projects would reduce perceptions of the need to use communication devices--cell phones or text messaging--and increase the likelihood of participating in future volunteer projects. Results strongly support the predictions in that the experimental group post-test mean score of the…

Since 1993, over 500,000 people have served in AmeriCorps national service programs. This dissertation evaluates the long-term impacts of AmeriCorps service on participants, particularly in the areas of civic engagement, future volunteerism, appreciation of diversity, and a number of other job and life skills. It fills a gap by using both…

This curriculum was developed in response to a need expressed by parents and parent groups across the country. It is intended to help parents learn strategies that will encourage their youth to remain in school and to graduate with peers. In preparation for presenting this workshop, you will need to have a clear understanding of state initiatives…

Three local colleges in the Lehigh Valley collaborate on a service-learning project called Brain Awareness Day to enhance neuroscience literacy among the public regarding the functions of the brain and benefits of brain research. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)