Bringing Service Into Science: Community-Engaged Service-Learning for Undergraduate and Graduate Epidemiology Students

Abstract

Service-learning is an effective and important teaching pedagogy for public health students that bridges classroom learning with meaningful practice in an effort to meet a community’s needs. Undergraduate and graduate epidemiology courses provide unique opportunities for experiential service-learning in public health education. However, best practices and effective examples for implementing and evaluating such experiences have been limited, leaving instructors seeking guidance. The purpose of this study was to describe the methods for developing and evaluating community-partnered service-learning activities in introductory graduate and undergraduate epidemiology courses. We present qualitative and quantitative findings from student assessment evaluations of three distinct service-learning activities over three separate semesters. Findings suggest that service-learning activities are highly valued by students and often represent their first experiences in population health research and primary data collection. Our findings also indicate that these initial experiences are opportune times for students to learn effective and important lessons for conducting health research as well as meaningfully engaging in their community. For health course instructors, the authors provide a timeline for developing such service-learning projects and describe techniques for overcoming challenges that arise in service-learning activity development and implementation.