Understanding Student And Faculty Attitudes With Respect To Service Learning: Lessons From The Humanitarian Engineering Program (original) (raw)
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Service Learning In Engineering Education: Impact On Faculty And Student Attitudes
2008 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
In the fall of 2004, a study was completed the Colorado School of Mines that compared engineering faculty and student attitudes with respect to community service. The primary purpose of the investigation was to acquire baseline data prior to the implementation of the new undergraduate Humanitarian Engineering Program. The purpose of this program is to prepare engineering students for careers that will interface with and directly benefit the underserved global community. Given this, it was anticipated that one outcome of the revised curriculum would be improved attitudes on the part of participants with respect to community service. The current paper compares student attitude data collected in a sophomore required course in 2004, before students had participated in the revised Humanitarian Engineering curriculum, to that of data collected from seniors in 2007, after students completed, or at least became aware of the revised curriculum. The results of this investigation indicate a difference in the students' attitudes between the two administration periods but a direct link could not be established between the differences in attitudes and the new program.
Proceedings Frontiers in Education 35th Annual Conference
Now entering its second year, the Humanitarian Engineering Program, which is sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, at the Colorado School of Mines, is creating curriculum that will support engineering students in developing an understanding of their responsibility for solving humanitarian problems that exist throughout the world. As part of this effort, baseline data has been collected on both the faculty and student attitudes towards service activities using the "Community Service Attitudes Scale" which was developed and validated by Shiarella, McCarthy, and Tucker 1. This paper uses this instrument to examine and compare the phase of development that faculty and students at the Colorado School of Mines have obtained with respect to service activities prior to the proposed intervention. During the fall of 2004, 78 students and 34 faculty responded to this assessment instrument. The results of this study suggest that the participating faculty were at a higher level of development with respect to service activities than were students.
Community Service Attitudes Of Engineering Students Engaged In Service Learning Projects
2008 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
One of the potential outcomes of incorporating service learning projects into engineering curriculum is that students may develop a greater sense of altruism and in their careers look for opportunities to use their skills to the benefit of society. It is of interest to see if service learning projects conducted in the context of a single semester design course can encourage students to value community service. The Community Service Attitudes Scale (CSAS) survey 1 was administered at the end of the semester in fall 2006 to a freshmen introductory Environmental Engineering course (EVEN 1000) and a senior design course in Environmental Engineering that incorporated service learning projects, and in fall 2007 at the end of an Engineering for the Developing World (EDW) course. Twelve students in the 2006 design course worked on a wastewater project for a community in Mexico, and the EDW students worked on a variety of domestic and international projects for developing communities. Some of the students in these courses were also participating in Engineers Without Borders (EWB) as an extracurricular activity. Based on the fall 2006 results, there were significant differences in the responses of the first-year versus senior design course for only 4 of the 61 questions. The fall 2007 EDW students were emailed the survey, and response rates were much lower than in the other two courses. Therefore, few differences due to gender, EWB participation, or other factors were evident. The results from this study are preliminary in nature due to the small number of survey respondents. However, at this time it appears that the curriculum made minimal impacts on community service attitudes. It also appears that differences in the attitudes of the senior/graduate student EWB participants in the EVEN design course on 10 questions (p<0.05; additional 4 questions with 0.1>p>0.05) were probably due to differences in what leads students to voluntarily participate in EWB as opposed to attitude changes due to the EWB experience itself.
Attitudes of Engineering Students from Underrepresented Groups Toward Service-Learning
2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Ongoing student surveys, supplemented by interviews, reveal that service in general and servicelearning (S-L) in particular are more attractive to those from underrepresented groups in engineering than to their counterparts. Courses with service-learning projects have been integrated into existing required courses in engineering over the past six years in five departments at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Entering engineering students have been sampled every fall with a "pre" survey, and then all students are surveyed "post" at the end of the spring semester. Evidence continues to mount of the significant difference in responses in attitudes toward community service and S-L in engineering with women especially and to a lesser extent other minorities in engineering. Voluntary participation in S-L projects involving work with and in developing countries continues to attract females at a rate of more than 3 times their underlying population. The results of these ongoing S-L courses and surveys point to a growing difference by gender in response to community service in general and service-learning in particular. If the engineering profession wants to attract and retain more people from underrepresented groups, more servicelearning in engineering appears to be one approach.
International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship
This research explored correlations between the social responsibility attitudes of engineering students and their participation in service-learning and/or extracurricular engineering service activities, such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Social responsibility attitudes were measured using a survey with fifty Likert items. The survey also collected information about students’ participation frequency in service-learning courses, EWB, and service trips. Survey responses were received from students at five institutions who were primarily in their first or senior year and majoring in civil, environmental, or mechanical engineering. Findings showed that incoming first-year students with higher frequency of service-learning participation during high school had higher average social responsibility. College service-learning courses had a beneficial impact on social responsibility attitudes. In open-ended responses, a number of students directly cited service-learning courses as impacti...
Engineering Faculty Attitudes Towards Service-learning
2020
As the Engineering Service-Learning Coordinator, Linda Barrington, B.S.M.E., M.B.A., serves as a faculty resource to identify community needs, facilitate community partnerships, and provide logistical support in service-learning projects imbedded into required engineering courses. Last academic year, she supported 22 faculty in 35 courses to provide more than 1,600 S-L experiences for engineering students with 25 community partners.
2020
Design courses embedded in service-learning are rapidly emerging within the curricula of many engineering programs. The learning outcomes service-learning courses seek to promote are well aligned with the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology criteria 2000 (EC 2000) 1. The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program integrates engineering design with meeting the needs of the local community through a multidisciplinary service-learning curricular structure. The EPICS courses can be counted for a wide range of courses in several disciplines, including capstone design in electrical and computer engineering and computer science. The approaches of EPICS to conceptualize and measure specific professional skills for program evaluation purposes are discussed. These include: socialresponsibility, awareness of ethical issues, teamwork, and communication competence. Specifically, the theoretical framework used for scale construction, preliminary results, and evidence of the scales' psychometric properties are provided. The aim of this paper is to provide information regarding the use of self-report measures to assess program outcomes. Service-learning seeks to promote student learning in the form of experiential education. Jaccoby and Associates 3 define service-learning as, "a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development…" (p. 5). Collectively, definitions of service-learning agree that it "joins two complex concepts: community action, the 'service,' and efforts to learn from that action and connect what is learned to existing knowledge, the 'learning'" (p. 2) 4 .
2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
is a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder in engineering education. Her research interests include engineering student learning, diversity and recruitment. Her current research is centered on the impacts of project-based service-learning on student identity, recruitment, and retention in engineering. She is a Co-Director of the Engineering for American Communities student organization, on the development team as well as a content editor for the TeachEngineering.org digital library, and has co-created and co-taught engineering elective courses for both high school and undergraduate students through CU-Boulder's Integrated Teaching and Learning Program. A former middle and high school math and science teacher, she received her MAT in secondary science from the Johns Hopkins University and her MS in civil engineering from CU-Boulder.
International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research, 2020
Students find it hard to engage themselves in the community activities due to some factors related to their academics, personal and social life in college. Measuring the student outcomes from the service learning experiences could help the institution in assessing the relevance of curriculum with some student activities. This study aims to describe the learning experiences of engineering students from their community involvement based on the selected student outcomes in terms of cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learning. Descriptive type of research was utilized in the study with 102 engineering students served as participants. Result showed that two (2) in every five (5) engineering students have average to high level of interest to participate in the community extension related activities. But they are willing to join primarily if they have free time together with their friends and classmates and if there will be additional points for their academic performance. Academic aspect is a major reason for students why most of them could not be able to join the community extension activities. Male engineering students have significantly higher learning experiences as defined in their student outcomes in developing their ability to function on multidisciplinary teams, ability to communicate effectively and having broad education to offer solutions for challenging issues of the society. Result also showed that those students who are not excited to participate and not confident to join with the group are most likely those with lower level of interest to join the community extension activities.
What Do Students Think About Service-learning in Required Engineering Courses?
2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Service-learning (S-L) has been integrated into an average of 30 engineering courses every year since 2004 in five undergraduate departments. Forty-three faculty members have tried S-L, over half the engineering faculty. In 2010-2011, 1267 students (out of an enrollment of 1600) engaged in S-L projects in 33 courses contributing an estimated 49,500 hours to the community. This approach to trying to develop better engineers and more engaged citizens was motivated by the growing body of research showing widespread benefits of S-L, the meeting of academic objectives through addressing real community needs in credit-bearing courses. But what do the students who are part of this program think about S-L? In this study surveys of student views were collected and analyzed. In general, the students are significantly positive in response to S-L. For example, two-thirds agree in principle with combining service and academic coursework. On average they agree that learning and interest in subject matter as well as professional skills are all improved with S-L. Two-thirds agree that S-L has helped keep them in engineering. Forty percent of those who knew about the S-L program said it was one of the factors for their coming to the engineering school. Significant large differences were found comparing female and male responses, with females more positive toward S-L. Over 75% of students indicate that service should be an expected part of the engineering profession. The implication is that service should be an expected and integrated part of the engineering curriculum.