Extracurricular Service Research Articles

Collaborative Strategy in Improving the Quality of Extracurricular Services in Elementary Schools

The aim of this research is to find out the cooperation strategy for improving the quality of extracurricular services at MI Mambaul Ulum Bondowoso. This research uses a qualitative-descriptive approach. School leaders, teachers, and parents are informants who participated in this study. Data collection methods involve in-depth interviews, observations of educational activities, and document analysis. Source triangulation and data triangulation techniques are used to ensure the validity of the data. Research findings reveal some findings. First, extracurriculars can support each other and create holistic education. Second, integrated extracurricular service quality implementation also involves coordinated teacher resources, being a benchmark in reaching students with diverse motivations, and contributing to future development policy formulation.

Benefits of Volunteerism: From Extracurricular to Service Learning and Beyond

AbstractFaculty continue to support extracurricular activities, co‐curricular activities and service learning for the long‐term student's benefits that outweigh obstacles present in community engagement. This case study describes relationship building between a community partner and an interior design programme through extra‐ and co‐curricular activities which led to more robust projects for service learning and engaged research. The programme was able to initially engage students with the community through a student volunteer charrette led by the student organisation. This extracurricular service activity resulted in continued engagement with one invested undergraduate student through a faculty‐supervised independent study that centred on research for the design of place‐based recovery spaces. The student and faculty continued to work with the organisation for ongoing spatial needs after the semester, including an abrupt re‐thinking of the space due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The narrative analysis of the case will demonstrate the benefits, challenges and impact of extra‐ and co‐curricular engaged activities as well as advocate for best practices in diversity, equity and inclusion to be explicit within existing frameworks for service learning.

Mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-to-face academic skills support

Given the choice, will students opt for a face-to-face or online learning session? The 301 Academic Skills Centre at the University of Sheffield provides academic skills training (including study skills and maths and statistics support) to students in the form of workshops, 1:1 appointments and online resources. The transition to online learning during spring 2020 acted as a catalyst for us to develop our digital offer, which proved extremely popular with students studying remotely. As teaching has returned to the classroom we have been keen to retain some of the positive impacts of our online support and to continue to offer students a choice in how they access our extracurricular service. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year we have provided the option of attending 1:1 appointments and workshops either online or face-to-face, which has provided us with a dataset of student preferences. We have been surprised by the ongoing scale of demand for online training and support and student feedback on the service has provided us with an insight into the reasons behind this demand. This conference session presented data collected during the 2021-22 academic year to explore how and why some students may prefer an online learning alternative and how we intend to develop this delivery model in the future.

Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Model in Colleges and Universities Based on The Integration of Specialty and Innovation

With the introduction of the educational concepts of "innovation and entrepreneurship" education and "three comprehensive education" in colleges and universities, different colleges and universities have also begun to introduce extracurricular entrepreneurship practice cases and information-based dual-creation service platforms in the teaching activities of subject curriculum content. And developed a complete set of systematic "integration of innovation and integration" teaching plan. From the perspective of "integration of specialization and innovation" in the construction of disciplines and majors, the integration of production and education and school-enterprise cooperation education in different disciplines in colleges and universities should be based on the teaching system of "integration of specialization and innovation" and the information-based innovation and entrepreneurship service platform. Under the integrated teaching situation, reform and innovate the original classroom teaching content and education mode, strengthen the problem exploration and interactive communication between teachers and students, and focus on the cultivation of students' innovative and entrepreneurial awareness, theoretical and practical skills, so as to solve the problem of professional knowledge teaching. The contradictions in the demand of social talents.

Medical students\u2019 preclinical service-learning experience and its effects on empathy in clinical training

BackgroundService learning (SL) is an educational methodology presumed to help medical students be more empathetic and compassionate. We longitudinally investigated the level of empathy in medical students and how preclinical SL experience was related to their level of empathy in their clinical clerkships.MethodsOur cohort comprised fifth-year medical students engaged in clerkships as part of a 7-year medical programme at one medical school in Taiwan. Surveys were conducted at the beginning of the clerkship in September 2015 (T1) to collect data on the medical students’ preclinical SL experience in curriculum-based service teams (CBSTs) and extracurricular service teams (ECSTs) and their SL self-efficacy, demographic characteristics, and empathy level. Subsequently, three follow-up surveys were conducted once every 3 months to determine the empathy level of the students during their clinical clerkships (T2–T4). Seventy students who returned the written informed consent and completed the baseline (T1) and two or more follow-up surveys (T2–T4) were included in our analysis with the response rate of 34%. In total, 247 responses across the 1-year clerkship were analysed. Descriptive statistics, paired t tests, and generalised estimating equations were employed.ResultsOur study revealed that changes in empathy level in the dimensions of perspective taking, compassionate care, and standing in patients’ shoes in their clinical clerkships. Relative to that at T1, their empathy decreased in perspective taking and compassionate care at T2–T4 but increased in standing in patients’ shoes at T3. Additionally, our study verified the positive effect of medical students’ preclinical SL experience in CBSTs and ECSTs on empathy in terms of compassionate care and perspective taking, respectively, but not on that of standing in patients’ shoes.ConclusionsSeparate investigations into subconstructs of empathy, such as perspective taking, compassionate care, and standing in patients’ shoes, in medical students may be necessary for exploring the various driving forces or barriers to developing empathy in medical students. Moreover, SL experience through both CBSTs and ECSTs at medical academies may have positive effects on medical students’ empathy in their clinical clerkships and should be promoted at medical schools.

The Relationship Between First-Year Learning Communities and Academic Performance in Introductory Psychology and Sociology

Objective: How do learning communities influence academic performance in Introductory Psychology? Method: The present research examines the relationship between participation in first-year students learning communities and academic performance across a variety of course requirements (midterms, finals, papers, and class participation) in introductory psychology and, for comparison, sociology courses. Results: Students who took Introductory Psychology as part of a first-year-student learning community outperformed their peers (who took the same course without a learning community) on the first exam of the semester and were less likely to miss assignments but otherwise showed no significant differences on the other course assignments; introductory sociology students part of these communities showed even greater differences in performance that lasted through the end of the semester. Conclusion: First-year students learning communities offers significant albeit limited benefits for student performance in introductory courses in the social sciences. Teaching Implications: Short of institutional efforts to enact programming for first-year learning communities, introductory psychology instructors can attempt to simulate the experience of such communities by promoting a sense of belonging via extra-curricular service or discipline-related activities.

The General Process of Organizing and Implementing Extracurricular Service Learning in American Colleges and Universities

In this paper, I focus on the general process of organizing and implementing extracurricular service learning in American colleges and universities in detail as follows: choose the achievable learning outcomes; consider what service experiences are most likely to enable participants to achieve the desired outcomes; choose the achievable learning outcomes; approach potential community partners; design the experience in detail; determine how you will prepare students for the experience; choose activities that are appropriate and meaningful for the participants; Integrate critical reflection throughout the experience; address logistical issues; develop a plan to measure achievement of students and community outcomes; seek closure, recognize and celebrate success. Clarifying the process of organizing and implementing extracurricular service learning in American higher education has certain reference significance for the operation of social practice in Chinese higher education.

The Process of Organizing and Implementing Curricular Service Learning in American Higher Education and Its Enlightenment on China

Service learning in American universities is divided into curricular service learning and extracurricular service learning. The corresponding process of organizing and implementing service learning in American universities is also divided into curricular service learning and extracurricular service learning. Take Michigan State University as the case, the six steps of investigation, preparation, engagement, reflection and connection, evaluation, demonstration or celebration are interpreted in detail. I focus on the process of organizing and implementing curricular service learning in detail. Clarifying the process of organizing and implementing curricular service learning in American higher education has certain reference significance for the transformation and development of some local colleges and universities in China.

Historic Preservation and Elementary Student Extracurricular Community Service

ABSTRACTElementary students survey buildings in an extracurricular community service project to learn social studies and historic preservation. From these experiences students formed values and dispositions by engaging in a constructivist process of creating knowledge by examining their community. They gathered data, transformed it into information, and shared it with the larger community. Because students learned what community means in reality, not just reading about it, they had a different understanding of how they related to the place they called home. Examining these types of questions helped elementary students have significant experiences that helped them to connect community members with the importance of place. The built environment is the context for historic structures. Student engagement with the social studies curriculum allowed them to create investigations with architecture to broaden their understanding of their world.

Sustainable Engineering Assessment Using Rubric-Based Analysis of Challenge Question Responses

A method to evaluate students’ application of sustainability principles into engineering design and problem solving was developed. Students were presented with two challenge questions that each posed a scenario. Students responded to one question and their answers were scored using a rubric that combined both analytic and holistic scoring criteria to account for sustainability principles. The rubric was iteratively developed and met standard measures of reliability and validity. Based on responses from primarily civil and environmental engineering students at three institutions, it was found that male students, seniors, and participants in many diverse learning activities (extracurricular service, internships, undergraduate research, and engineering design courses) achieved higher rubric scores. Scores on the challenge questions did not correlate to students’ interests in sustainable engineering, which were measured using a Likert-based survey. A challenge-question approach to formative assessment may enable instructors to adapt curricula to foster student learning of implicit sustainability issues in engineering. The rubric may be used with a diversity of content-focused challenge questions as a tool for assessing students’ holistic, sustainability-focused approaches to engineering.

The Pre-Career Consequences of Public Service Motivation: Exploring Service Orientation Among College Freshman

Before an individual makes a job choice — or even a college major — public service motivation (PSM) surfaces among college freshman as an influential motivator for public oriented behaviors. In this paper we explore how PSM is related to the service orientation of college freshman. More specifically, we ask whether PSM is related to two dimensions of a student’s service orientation: 1) curricular service orientation (service learning) and 2) extracurricular service orientation (volunteering frequency). While PSM’s relationship with prosocial behavior has been established among adults, we have yet to examine how it affects the behavior of individuals who are pre-career or pre-service. An additional innovation of this study is that we use four different operationalizations of PSM. Using survey data from undergraduate students in a required political science seminar we estimate models of PSM’s relationship with the two dimensions of an individual’s service orientation. Our results indicate that PSM has a positive relationship with both curricular service learning and extracurricular service learning in the sample. We discuss the implications of these findings for public service education and training.

Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War (review)

Reviewed by: Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War Karen Coats Ellis, Deborah . Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War; written and illus. with photographs by Deborah Ellis. Groundwood, 2012. 143p. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-55498-181-6 $15.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-55498-203-5 $15.95 R Gr. 6-9. This nonfiction counterpart to The Breadwinner and its sequels consists of interviews of twenty-seven survivors of the Taliban regime and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, all between ten and seventeen years old. The interviews are presented in paragraphs with the questions removed, although it is fairly clear in reading them what sorts of prompts were provided; each subject, for instance, talks in a fairly consistent order about his or her family, current life, school (if he or she attends one), memories, fears, and finally, his or her hopes for both a personal future as well as the future of Afghanistan. First giving the name and age of each interviewee and often a picture, Ellis then provides context for the interview in a brief introduction that describes the larger cultural and historical reasons behind the particular situation the person finds him or herself in; these introductions are extremely useful in helping readers see the big picture of how the prolonged war has proven devastating to domestic life. A subtle but informative contrast then emerges as the interviewees describe how much better their lives are now than when they lived under the Taliban, and most credit the value of the education they are now able to receive for the hope they have for their futures. Some of the interviews remain bleak, however; in particular, the voice of a ten-year-old boy living in a refugee camp with nothing to do and little hope of change is heart-rending. Obviously useful for current events curricula, this book will also be valuable for inspiring extracurricular service projects; resources are included for further research. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

International Experiential Learning Course Design

International experiential learning projects have increased in popularity over recent years, and many of these projects focus on environmental topics in the developing world. An experimental course in International Groundwater Studies was developed to bridge the gap between extracurricular service type programs and academically-based study abroad programs. The course included online instruction in order to accommodate varying student schedules, and an eight-day field trip to Guatemala was included in the curriculum. These challenging situational factors led to the decision to apply formal design theory to the course, and qualitative self-reported data were collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the formally-designed course to address both the course learning objectives as well as concerns regarding collaborative functionality between students who had had little in-person interaction prior to traveling.