Implementing and Assessing a College Service-Learning Program: The Alternative Spring Break Program

• In Event: 34.073 - Providing Equitable Opportunities to Educate Diverse Populations for Achievement Outcomes That Equal or Exceed Expectations

Abstract

The Alternative Spring Break Program, is a service learning program designed to provide opportunities for selected students to learn experientially or enhance skills and competencies including those beyond the academic and technical. Development/enhancement of skills related to leadership, critical thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal relations, is also intended. Another aim focuses on fostering positive dispositions toward civic, social, humanitarian, multicultural engagements and responsibilities, and interdenominational cooperation. Students were sent to serve as teachers, tutors, mentors, counselors, builders and health workers in locations in more than a dozen states and several nations (e.g., New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Haiti) during the two weeks of their spring break.
Situated learning (Lave, 1991) holds that learning, occurring normally, is a function of activity in the context and culture in which it occurs (or is situated), and is dependent on social interaction. Learners are involved in a "community of practice" embodying beliefs and behaviors to be acquired. A perspective comes from the position of John Dewey (1916) emphasizing the “democratic” engagement of scholars with “publics” in manners that raise awareness of and solution to social problems (in education and beyond) democratically and publically. Standard multiple methods of assessment and evaluation were employed. Triangulation of survey, focus group and individual interview data was designed for.
Surveys were administered to stakeholder groups (student participants, site coordinators, team leaders, and service site supervisors). Reflection log content gathered daily (on-line) from team leaders in the field, based on their observations of reflection sessions held with student participants. Separate focus groups conducted by researchers with program team leaders and student participants. Individual interviews conducted with program administrators, team leaders, and several site coordinators of special locations (e.g., Haiti, and West Virginia Correctional Facility).
Based on 198 student-participant and leader ratings, formative/process evaluation data indicate that the ASBP 2016 was successfully implemented, with 92% rating program administration/implementation as “good” to “excellent” (5-point scale). In ranking the three most affected areas of growth attributed to the ASBP, “compassionate understanding of social and human relations” was cited number one most often by student respondents (30%); “intellectual openness” (12%); and “collaboration, cooperation/team work skills” (11%).
This study provides a model for structuring large-scale college service learning programs and assessing them using a comprehensive, multiple-method approach which yields formative and impact level information.
References:
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.

Author

• Michael B. Wallace, Howard University