The concept of service-learning combines academic studies with real-world community issues. It aims to help students develop themselves through reflection and critical thinking while also making a positive impact on the community. Integrating service-learning into foreign language and culture education can fulfill the need for practical language…

For some time now, the arts education community has designed for broader outcomes for youth. These programs intentionally foster not only youth achievements within the arts or academics, but also youth and community thriving--through outcomes such as youth civic engagement, occupational identities, and wellness. In this report, the authors seek to…

Is assessment a top-down bureaucratic mandate, an undertaking that seems to have little to do with improving practice, an inauthentic activity that frustrates and disempowers, an afterthought? Or is it a process embraced and enacted together by all stakeholders as a means to learn and grow and enact change in the world? The authors of the…

Community-engaged learning opportunities are increasingly prevalent in higher education. In addition to positive personal growth and learning outcomes, these opportunities allow students to learn about the community surrounding their campus and formulate their own understandings of social responsibility and citizenship. These connections can be…

This article reports on initial findings from "Learning By Doing," a citizen science research project funded by a NSW DOE Strategic Research Grant. Our study aimed to understand the process of integrating citizen science into schools, the perceived outcomes and impacts for students, and ways to evaluate citizen science projects. In this…

Civic engagement is recognized as a critical process to address environmental and other societal issues. To examine the intersection between environmental education and civic engagement, as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, we undertook a systematic mixed studies review to identify environmental education program outcomes related to civic…

Purpose: Program planning and evaluation is an essential course for undergraduate and graduate students in health education/public health programs. The purpose of this study was to three-fold: 1) identify students' attitudes and behaviors towards civic engagement, 2) measure the importance of undergraduate collaboration with community partners,…

This article discusses the use of community partnerships to produce civic engagement. In two undergraduate courses during the Fall 2016 semester, students created products that met the stated needs of local nonprofit organizations. Students indicated a positive reaction to their experiences in qualitative assessment instruments, and the community…

Previous scholarship has outlined possible models of civics education but have neglected to provide frameworks for evaluation of the way such educative programs contribute to ongoing active citizenship amongst the participants. This paper explicates a framework that can be used to analyse how effectively programs are developing active citizenship…

Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) at Macquarie University offers undergraduate students experiential learning opportunities with local, regional, and international partners. In PACE projects, students work toward meeting the partner's organizational goals while they develop their capabilities, learn through the process of engagement,…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to better understand how program planning and evaluation courses prepare students for their future careers in various health settings. Participants (n=20) from three different institutions with Health Education programs in the U.S. participated in the study. Methods: A modified snow-ball sampling technique was…

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in research but may not fully explain or predict outcome variations in community-based interventions. Demonstrating efficacy of externally driven programs in well-controlled environments may not translate to community-based implementation where resources and priorities vary. A bottom-up evaluation…

In this quasi-experimental design, I examine the impact of a political engagement program on students, looking at traditional measures of internal efficacy, as well as other areas of political engagement including levels of political knowledge, the development of political skills, and interest in media coverage of politics.

Providing opportunities to foster students' civic engagement during their undergraduate education is a goal of many universities. There are a variety of ways in which students participate in community service and in community change efforts and social change initiatives; capturing how students integrate these experiences into their broader…

This article introduces the Citizen Scholars Program, a 2-year service-learning and leadership development program that integrates theory and practice to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and vision the authors believe they need in order to build community, be effective citizens, and advocate for social justice. The authors present 16…