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Assessment of Students' Community-Engaged Learning
Service-learning and community-engaged learning are high-impact educational practices, shown to have measurable impacts on students’ attitudes, values, and skills over the course of just one semester. Assessing those often abstract impacts as an instructor can prove challenging. It’s essential to evaluate students’ learning, rather than their service, and to provide feedback along the way ( Bradley, 1995 ).
Below are some recommendations and resources to help you more effectively measure the effects of your community-engaged teaching.
- Facilitate reflection as a method of formative assessment for your course. Formative assessment is often low-stakes or ungraded; it provides the instructor with information about students’ learning and experiences as well as an opportunity to offer feedback.
- Reflection also fosters meta-cognition , which improves students’ self-awareness and ability to transfer learning to new situations.
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Collect information you can use to refine your teaching and assessment for
future
courses.
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
offer low- to medium-prep exercises to check students' learning and
response to teaching.
- Reflection Examples