Service-Learning Course Evaluation / Assessment

This post brings my series on Service-Learning to a close and has to do with course evaluations. To assess faculty on evaluating / assessing a Service-Learning course, the American Association for Higher Education Assessment Forum (1992) developed the following Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning. Service-Learning courses do, of course, have certain unique characteristics that must be taken into account. The most important consideration in evaluating a Service-Learning course is that all parties in the project must be assessed or evaluated including the students, community partner, and faculty involved in the project. As such, the following should be assessed or evaluated:

§ To what extent did the students achieve the learning objectives?

§ To what extent were service goals met?

§ How successful was the project for each student?

§ How successful was the project for the class as a whole?

§ How successful was the project for the community agency / organization?

§ How beneficial was the project to the service recipients?

§ How well did the course satisfy the instructor’s expectations / goals?

Techniques for course assessment / evaluation

Some of the assessment techniques include:

§ Small Group Instructional Diagnostic (SGID)

§ One Minute Papers

§ Informal Early Feedback (IEF)

§ Consultation with experienced members of your, or the nearest, faculty developement office

§ Checklist of student behaviors

§ Informal audit by another faculty member experienced in SL

§ Consultation with one of the SL Faculty Fellows

§ Standard Purdue course evaluation via school forms or PICES

§ Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) whereby formalized research is conducted and ultimately made public concerning the effectiveness of the SL component of the course.

§ Benchmarking the course against those that constitute best practices in SL which are those that have been recognized or rewarded for exemplary use of the pedagogy, such as Purdue’s EPICS program.


I hope this series on Service-Learning has been helpful. For additional references on Service-Learning please visit the following:

Learning Goals and Objectives references found at:
http://students.berkeley.edu/calcorps/slcourse.html
http://www.ncsu.edu/fctl/Initiatives/Service-Learning/facultytraining/slobjectives/
http://www.adprima.com/verbs.htm
http://www.uvcs.uvic.ca/desweb/RES/OBJECT.HTM
http://www.fiu.edu/~time4chg/Library/goals.html
http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art3_4.htm

Student Reflection references found at:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~slee/html/faculty.shtml#reflect
http://www.nyc.gov.sg/sl/sl_elements.html
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/jsl/fall96/0104.html

Assessment / Evaluation of Student Learning references found at:
http://www.northern.edu/ASLP/authentic.html

Assessing / Evaluating the Success of SL in Your Course
Assessment Forum. (1992). Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning. Washington, DC: American Association of Higher Education.