Underrepresented students have been identified as being less likely to attain a college degree than their majority counterparts. Service-learning (SL) offers students an opportunity to engage in community work and improve skills that might contribute to their educational success in college. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of SL…

Underrepresented students have been identified as being less likely to attain a college degree than their majority counterparts. Experiential pedagogies, specifically service-learning (SL), offer students an opportunity to engage in community work and improve skills that might contribute to their educational success in college. The present study…

At its most basic level, service learning integrates community service activities with intentional learning components to enhance students' understanding of subject content and to meet identified community needs. Although service learning is similar to other active learning pedagogies--such as project-based, problem-based, inquiry-based, and…

To encourage greater adoption of a pedagogical innovation (service-learning), semester long faculty learning communities were established at eight institutions. These learning community experiences produced gains in participants' (N = 152) self-assessed expertise with service-learning, ability to collaborate with community partners, and…

Explores the rationale for establishing a national center for research on service learning, outlining various current issues and challenges in conducting service learning research and describing how the establishment of a national center can raise the standards and visibility of service learning research. Offers several suggestions about how the…

Offers three strategies for overcoming the challenges of advancing and institutionalizing service learning at research universities. The strategies address making service learning integral to faculty research, the university mission, and the disciplines. (EV)

Students from seven institutions of higher education reported their preferences for different paradigms of service at the beginning of their service-learning courses. At the end of the courses, they described the associated service activities in terms of the same paradigms and also completed scales describing their learning outcomes and attitudes…