An Educationally-Beneficial Experience for Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Service-learning has been an increasingly used high impact approach to facilitate applied learning. Mentorship between undergraduate students and youth is commonly utilized as a tactic to support one of the goals of service-learning: addressing and fulfilling community needs. A consistently underserved and underrepresented population of youth are Native Americans who reside on rural reservations who often experience community-wide social problems. While often the impacts of mentorship on youth are researched, this study examines the impact on undergraduate students' perceptions after completing a mentoring intervention with Native American youth. A mixed method approach was designed, using pre- and post-surveys as well as a final reflective comprehensive paper to collect data. The results concluded that by completing the service-learning project in partnership with the Native American youth, it created positive impacts on the undergraduate students' educational perceptions, such as with an underrepresented culture, mentoring intervention, and applied research.