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Service learning—an educational experience in which students provide service to a community partner while learning content knowledge, professional skills, and critical thinking—can provide significant benefits to students and the community. We present survey results from 227 postsecondary students in computing to provide insights into their attitudes toward service learning, and how these relate to course-taking motivations and sense of civic duty. Based on the survey results, we argue that service learning should be required in an undergraduate computing major. However, we problematize this provocation based on three types of pitfalls: courses that do not prepare students to understand social contexts in which technical solutions are promoted, lack of resources for faculty teaching the courses, and the potential to harm both community partners and students.
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CISing Up Service Learning: A Systematic Review of Service Learning Experiences in Computer and Information Science
The benefits of service learning in computer and information science (CIS) are believed to be significant, ranging from providing students with real-world experiences to retaining students to positively impacting community partners. Although there are many benefits of service learning, the CIS domain does impose unique costs for integrating service learning into the curriculum. Yet there is little systematic research to help the CIS community understand best practices for maximizing benefits while minimizing costs. Experience reports about service learning courses in CIS have appeared in the literature annually since 2000, and thus we address this gap in knowledge by conducting a systematic review and content analysis of 84 experience reports from theThe ACM Guide to Computing Literature. We synthesize the current state of service learning in CIS as well as derive recommendations for best practices and future research directions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1920851
- PAR ID:
- 10471446
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Computing Education
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1946-6226
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 56
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Community-engaged learning is an emerging term for a wide spectrum of learning activities that bring together students and community partners in a mutually beneficial way. Service learning is a subcategory of community-engaged learning which traditionally involves the students using their skills or expertise on a project that will directly benefit the community partner. In computer science, service learning projects often include a deliverable, such as designing and building an application. Community-based service learning is service learning with a community partner, usually a non-profit, whose mission is to improve the social, environmental, or economic situation for community members. Undertaking service learning in general and community-based service learning in particular presents significant challenges. Some of these include the identification of an appropriate non-profit community partner and project, project skill alignment, managing partner expectations (failure is an option), and the reconciliation of the variable length of meaningful service-learning projects with the fixed length of a single term. However, given how these unique learning opportunities are known to be highly beneficial to students, educators continue to pursue them in spite of their inherent difficulties. This BoF seeks to gather together seasoned hands, novices, plus those interested in trying out community-based service learning to - Build a community of practice? among those who undertake community-based service learning, - share best practices, - present innovations, and - illuminate pitfalls and other practices to be avoided.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3610776
