The Effects of Service Learning - Industry Overview

School Administrator, August, 2000 by Shelley H. Billig

Research, while limited, finds that students who help others help themselves academically and socially

If you ask most educators about service learning, you're likely to receive one of the following responses:

a) they don't know what you are talking about;

b) they confuse it with community service;

c) they worry it will take precious time from the basics or won't help students score high on state achievement tests; or

d)they think it is the best thing that has happened to education and their schools in quite some time.

One's opinion tends to be associated with exposure to service learning. The more you know about it and work with it, the more you are likely to know what it is and the difference between service and service learning. The more you know about the differences, the more likely you are to commit to a high-quality program. The higher the quality of the program, the more passionately you believe service learning produces important benefits for students, schools and communities.

Even believers, though, are often hard put to point to research that bolsters their view.

We should know more than we do about the impact of service learning. The National Center for Education Statistics conducted a 1999 survey that showed nearly a third of all public schools and half of all public high schools provide service learning where community service is directly linked with classroom instruction. Rarely, however, do schools engage in a systematic study of the results of service learning, and most of the available "research" in the field is not research at all, but rather the results of program evaluations.

During the last decade, however, more researchers have begun to examine the effects of service learning rigorously and, as a body of evidence, the literature reveals promising trends. What follows briefly summarizes what we know about the field of service learning and its effects on students, schools and communities.

Service Defined

One of the chief reasons that people cannot point to the impact of service learning is that it is defined in various ways. Most educators agree that service learning is a teaching strategy that links community services to classroom instruction. Most also believe that high-quality service learning includes:

* thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet authentic community needs;

* structured time that allows students to talk, think and/or write or otherwise reflect about the service experience; and

* activities that enable students to engage in planning service in collaboration with community members, specifically giving students an opportunity to make decisions and solve problems.

Quality service-learning programs also meet other criteria promoted by many leaders and researchers and expressed in the "Essential Elements of Service-Learning," a set of quality indicators developed by the National Youth Leadership Council and others. The characteristics include the provision of professional training to support program design and implementation, use of assessment to improve programs and especially support by district and school leaders.

The difference between service learning and community service is the linkage to the curriculum. The stronger the linkage (particularly with the standards connected to the curriculum and measured by the accountability test), the more the impact on academic achievement measures, according to a recent review of the K-12 research literature.

Student Effects

Research on service learning conducted during the 1990s comprises several hundred studies. A critical review can eliminate many of these from the analysis of impacts because they were studies of community service rather than service learning or they consisted of program descriptions, anecdotal evidence or discussions of best practice.

The studies that remained were primarily program evaluations with varying degrees of rigor. Some were well-designed quantitative studies with control groups and pre/post test measures. Others were well-designed qualitative research. Still others were not very well designed and lacked sophistication in the analysis.

As a whole, however, the body of evidence is compelling. Service learning has an impact on its participants in terms of personal and social development, academic achievement, development of civic responsibility and career exploration. Further, high-quality service-learning programs were much more likely to make a difference than those that did not meet quality standards.

Social Development

Studies that evaluated high-quality service-learning programs in California, Indiana and in other states showed that youth who engage in service learning showed increases in measures of personal and social responsibility, sense of educational and social competence and self-esteem or self-efficacy. Participating high school students in Florida, for example, were less likely to be referred to the office for disciplinary measures than before their participation.

A national study of high quality programs, conducted by Alan Melchior of Brandeis University, showed that participants were less likely to engage in behaviors that led to pregnancy or arrest during and after they had participated in service learning.