A New Method of Assessing the Effects of a Service-Learning Class on Engineering Undergraduate Students

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Increases in engineering service learning courses and enrolled undergraduates necessitate further research and recommendations concerning the assessment of student learning and growth. Assessment of such growth may be difficult in service learning courses because of the types of skills it fosters: interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and other professional skills not easily tested for in a classroom. Some previous attempts at assessment were predominantly standards-based and designed to measure what researchers thought students should gain from the course, rather than being based in what students thought. In this paper, we first ask students what skills they learned in service learning, determine their thoughts about the usefulness of different kinds of assessment, and then use their words to construct a naturalistic assessment that can serve as a pre- and post-test to measure growth in engineering service learning courses. The data come from 96 students and three semesters of a service learning section of a large Introduction to Engineering course at a large state university. Overall, we conclude that students perceive that they have grown at statistically significant levels in communication skills, teamwork, leadership, time management, and other engineering skills noted below. We argue that student perceptions of growth matter for their persistence in engineering and resilience after professional or academic setbacks.