The Make a Difference model transforms community service from free labor and low-level tasks to efforts yielding genuine community improvement and enhanced academic performance. Students study the organization they work for and/or the chosen problem. California middle-school students conducted interviews, located primary sources, and created a…

Service learning, practiced effectively in Sharon (Massachusetts) Public Schools, should connect with learning topics that are already part of the curriculum, perform an ongoing service meeting a recognized community need, involve indepth learning, balance service with learning, and involve collaboration with community organizations. (Contains 14…

The authors examined how the performance of community service through the Jumpstart program contributed to the civic and multicultural education of college students nationwide during the 2003-04 academic year. In addition to mentoring at-risk preschool children on a weekly basis for an entire academic year, Jumpstart participants were required to…

The concurrent conditions of deafness and blindness present a set of unique needs within a community that highly values independence and autonomy. This project assesses the service-learning initiative in a post-secondary Interpreter Education Program (IEP) in which students learn via civic engagement with the Deaf-Blind community to employ…

The purpose of this article is to review a partnership between a teacher education department and a dropout prevention program. The partnership developed from a variety of communities' needs, no less of which was that of reconnecting marginalized youth at a local dropout prevention school with their community through cultural and civic…

Discusses the specific and complex outcomes of community service participation in higher education. Argues that support for community service learning is likely to wane if long-standing narrow beliefs about cognition are not challenged; educators need to think more holistically about what constitutes an educated person. (Contains 22 references.)…

Discusses service-learning programs, focusing on school-based programs that give students the opportunity to apply academic and nonacademic skills to real-life situations. Outlines some keys to effective programs, illustrated by the experiences of a charter school in Hoboken, New Jersey. (SLD)

The "Core Indicators of Effectiveness Report" delineates the performance of Wyoming's community colleges as measured by the 14 indicators set forth by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and adopted by the seven Wyoming community colleges and the Wyoming Community College Commission in 2002. These indicators, while…

Underserved youths are affected by a variety of circumstances such as poverty, poor nutrition, and low physical activity levels. While many extended-day physical activity programs exist, few focus on the importance of health and wellness. The purpose of this article is to describe the development of an extended-day program for underserved youths…

The Building Migratory Bridges (BOMB) program--a collaboration between the Marvel wood School and Audubon Sharon in Connecticut and Conservation Research Education Action (CR EA), a U.S. not-for-profit in Panama--uses nontropical migratory bird research in the United States and Panama to demonstrate how negative environmental impacts in one…

This paper proposes that schools can participate with communities to partially alleviate the concerns about a steady blood supply. A review of the literature reveals the effective use of social learning models to encourage high school students to participate in blood drives. Combining an educational approach with a psychological approach to obtain…

Discusses the development of a survey instrument designed to measure the impact of service learning on student development, specifically students' sense of caring, ethics, connectedness, collaboration, diversity, reciprocity, and self-efficacy. The authors invite other service-learning practitioners to utilize the instrument, and if they wish, to…

Evaluates the outcomes of the service-learning component in two undergraduate courses in which some students identified their own service-learning sites and others chose one of three pre-arranged sites. Concludes that all students experienced a greater understanding of the course content and their roles as citizens, but students who arranged their…

Conversations continue as to whether and how community-based learning and research (CBLR) can be most effectively integrated into the mission and practice of institutions of higher education (IHEs). In 2005, eight District of Columbia- (DC-) area universities affiliated with the Community Research and Learning (CoRAL) Network engaged in a planning…

This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews with 40 representatives from 12 community-based organizations (CBOs) working with the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. These CBOs see themselves as partners with the University in educating college students about the realities of racial and…