Students' Self-Assessment of Learning through Service-Learning

Abstract

The objective of the study was to determine what students learn through Service Learning (SL), based on their self-assessment of the learning. Survey instruments were administered to students at the beginning and end of a required SL course in one college's pharmacy curriculum. Students' responses revealed their personal and professional attitudes and how they changed as a result of their participation in the course; what they believed they had learned in this course; and what factors may have affected their attitudinal changes and learning. Actual course outcomes were reviewed in light of the educational outcomes of the Center for the Advancement of Pharmaceutical Education (CAPE). The study is the first step in what needs to be a longer-term assessment based on objective measures of learning, but it demonstrates concrete learning outcomes of service-learning.

Student-Directed Learning in a Community Geriatrics Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience

“…[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][13][14][15][16] Assessment of service-learning experiences, including evidence of student learning, have previously been based on structured pre-experience and post-experience assessments, including Likert-type surveys addressing student satisfaction or changes in attitudes, and to a lesser degree, notations in students' written reflections. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]14,15 This assessment differed in that it was based on systematic determination of what students said they intended to learn and what they said they actually learned in a self-directed experience, as described in their initial and final essays. In addition to the residential setting and self-directed nature of this experience, this community geriatrics experience differed from traditional APPEs in other ways.…”

“…Others have since reported incorporating service-learning into the pharmacy curriculum, although there has been significant variability among colleges and schools in the types of servicelearning experiences provided and its placement in the curriculum. 5,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Few, however, have reported using this pedagogy at the advanced practice experience level. 5,15 Life-long learning, a foundation for maintaining professional competence, is another essential competency in pharmacy.…”

“Blogging” About Course Concepts: Using Technology for Reflective Journaling in a Communications Class

“…Portfolios of student work can thus be ''collected, edited, and assessed, with the immediacy of publishing for a virtual audience,'' 17 which may include instructors, preceptors, or colleagues. Servicelearning programs often use reflective journaling, 3,18 for which a Web log is readily applicable. Experiential preceptors who manage a large number of students could use Web logs as a management tool for maintaining a ''recorded dialogue'' with multiple students, and for sharing information in an online repository available at all hours.…”

“…Reflective journaling is often associated with teacher education and humanities courses, but has also been used as a learning tool in a variety of other disciplines, including pharmacy [1][2][3] and other health professions education. [4][5][6][7] Journal writing may be viewed as ''a device for working with events and experiences in order to extract meaning from them.''…”

Impact of a Service-Learning Course on First-Year Pharmacy Students' Learning Outcomes

“…12 A follow-up article describes a subsequent offering of the course, in which open-ended questions were posed to the students to determine what they could articulate regarding what they had learned about a variety of topics addressed in the course. 7 In this article, we compared the learning outcomes of students engaged in service learning with those of a control group.…”