Faculty and Student Attitudes Toward Community Service: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The Humanitarian Engineering initiative, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, at the Colorado School of Mines, is creating a program that will support engineering students in understanding their responsibility for solving community development problems that exist throughout the world. As part of this effort, data has been collected on faculty and student attitudes using the "Community Service Attitudes Scale," developed and validated by Shiarella, McCarthy, and Tucker. During the fall 2004, 78 students and 34 faculty members responded to this instrument. Statistically significant differences were found between the attitudes of students and faculty, males and females, and among different age groupings with respect to service activities. A general finding was that faculty displayed better attitudes toward community service than the students.

Engineering Competence? An Interpretive Investigation of Engineering Students' Professional Formation

“…With respect to quality control of educational programs, the results of this study suggest a careful combination of, first, checks that tangible learning outcomes are achieved and, second, attention to the implicit learning processes that shape some of the less tangible learning outcomes. A way to implementing such a balance pedagogically are, for example, open learning opportunities such as problem-based learning (Ahern, 2010;Kolmos, 1996;Mills & Treagust, 2003;Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005) or service learning approaches (Bauer, Barbara, Joan, Juan, & David, 2007;Coyle et al, 2005;Edward, Leah, & William, 2006). Such approaches that Vanasura and colleagues (2009) describe as "learning opportunities to broadly define anything designed by the faculty to foster students' development" (p. 68), might ultimately mean that engineering education needs to relinquish some of the comprehensive control of student learning (Doll, 1993) that is implied in the current application of educational outcomes.…”

Engineering Academic Programs for Hydrophilanthropy: Commonalities and Challenges

“…The perceived benefits suggest enhanced skills, knowledge, attitudes, and identity among students, notably better teamwork, project management, public relations, and technical communications skills, increased global and societal context of work, greater intercultural awareness, and a keener sense of professional contribution to society. These experiences have been widely reported to increase involvement of under-represented groups, particularly women (e.g., Bielefeldt et al 2009;Paterson and Fuchs 2008;Mihelcic et al 2008;Moskal et al 2008;Bauer et al 2007;Qanhiyah 2005;Zitomer et al 2003;Lackland and DeLisi 2001;Pritchard 2000). Accordingly, there has been a recent proliferation of programs for undergraduate and graduate students, including service projects, service learning opportunities, design projects focused on appropriate technologies, and research projects focused on development.…”

“…Although there is a general perception that such activities bring substantial benefit to both the students involved and the communities aided, there have to date been relatively few studies that rigorously measure potential impacts to all stakeholders. Examples of recent assessments of impact on students and faculty can be found in Bauer et al (2007), Borgi and Zitomer (2008), as well as in Bielefeldt et al (2009). Studies that include impacts on partnering communities include Moskal et al (2008) and Silliman (2009).…”

Curiosity, Connection, Creating Value: Improving Service Learning by Applying the Entrepreneurial Mindset

“…This instrument has been validated for reliability [15][16][17] and has also been used in engineering education contexts, 17,18 including having been used to assess the performance of the previous introductory programming cohort. The CSAS survey consists of 46 questions utilizing a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 represents "strongly disagree" or "extremely unlikely" and 7 represents "strongly agree" or "extremely likely."…”