This study examined how teachers' perceptions and attitudes and students'
perceptions impacted the learning outcomes students received from their participation in
service-learning. Service-learning is a form of experiential learning that endeavors to
enhance students' academic and civic education through participation in community
service. Two learning outcomes of service-learning were investigated: student problem
solving and leadership skills. The data consisted of survey responses from 443 middle
and high school students and their respective teachers that participated in evaluation
research conducted by the Texas Center for Service-Learning and Texas A&M
University during the 2007-2008 academic year. The survey items used from the teacher
surveys focused on whether teachers felt that administrators took their opinions and
ideas into account when making decisions regarding the service-learning program, as
well as items that focused on teachers' general attitude towards the program. Survey
items used from the student surveys focused on whether students felt their teacher enjoyed service-learning projects, as well as survey items that focused on students' selfefficacy
in terms of problem solving and leadership skills.
The basic hypotheses were: (1) the more institutionalized the service-learning
program is in the students' school, the more positive benefits they receive from their
program involvement, (2) when students perceive that they have more ownership of the
service-learning program, they receive more benefits from their participation, and (3) the
more positively students perceive the teacher's perception of the service-learning
program, the more positive benefits students receive for their program involvement.
Path analysis and multiple regression are used to test the hypotheses.
Contrary to what was expected, the data indicated that institutionalization was
significantly, negatively related to student problem solving (-.3007, p less than or equal to .001) and
leadership skills (-.4020, p less than or equal to .001). As expected, the data showed that student
perception of student ownership of the service-learning program was significantly,
positively related to student problem solving (1.0845, p less than or equal to .05) and leadership skills
(2.4721, p less than or equal to .001). The data also showed that teacher attitude was very important in
regard to student perception of the teacher's attitude and student perception of student
ownership of the program, as well as student problem solving and leadership skills. The
data suggested that the teacher's attitude was more important in terms of student learning
outcomes than the student's perception of the teacher's attitude.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-12-7457 |
| Date | 2009 December 1900 |
| Creators | Goolsby, Tessa Maring |
| Contributors | Sell, Jane A. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds