Assessment Methods for Service-Learning Projects in Engineering in Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Service-learning (SL) helps engineering students to be involved in community activities and to be motivated by their studies. Although several reviews and research studies have been published about SL, it is not widespread in sciences and engineering at the university level. The purpose of this research is to analyze the different community services or projects where SL is implemented by engineering students and faculty and to identify the procedures that were usually implemented to assess SL-based courses and activities. Assessment could be considered as the evaluation of a specific module and the engineering competencies, the evaluation of the effectiveness of the SL program, the assessment of the participation of the student in those programs, and the assessment of whether students have achieved certain outcomes or gained specific skills. We conducted a systematic review with a search in three scientific databases: Scopus, Science Direct, and ERIC educational database to analyze the assessment methods and what that assessment covers. From 14,107 publications related to SL, 120 documents were analyzed to inform the conclusions of this study. We found that SL is widely used in several universities as experiential education, and it is considered an academic activity. The most widely used assessment technique is a survey to evaluate the engagement and attitudes of students and, to a lesser extent, teamwork presentations.

Inclusion of Education for Sustainable Development in Environmental Engineering. A Systematic Review

“…These carry out accreditation processes in engineering, which include the importance of environmental sustainability [22]. This means that universities are constantly in educational innovation processes and always keeping in mind the demands of the planet that are disclosed from the UN [37].…”

Educating Future Agricultural Engineers at the University of Burgos, Spain, through a Service-Learning Project on Rural Depopulation and Its Social Consequences

“…In relation to the question referring to the overall assessment, the teachers stated that they were very satisfied. Their reflection focused on the idea that most engineers would play an active role in the improvement of their surrounding area, if they could, and agricultural engineers might therefore consider playing active roles to improve the rural environment in which they work, an aspect that could be instilled in the students through S-LP experiences and which is the final objective of this type of teaching experience in engineering [24,29]. The teachers also highlighted the social awareness achieved through the S-LP.…”

“…And an agricultural engineer designs crops to provide food and infrastructures that develop the rural environment and improve rural living conditions. This perception is also not helped by the high number of concepts that have to be explained on technical university courses [22], generally of a very varied nature that are hardly conducive to focusing this type of activity on a specific social issue [23,24].…”

“…The first four questions were formulated to discover their opinions of student learning, fundamentally determining whether they had acquired the academic and personal competencies established in the S-LP. The other two questions sought to ascertain the personal opinions of the teachers on the S-LP and their own learning during that time, with the aim of verifying the level of social awareness on rural depopulation that the S-LP generated, not only for the students, but also for the other actors, which is one of the central positive aspects of an S-LP teaching experience [23,24].…”

A Keyword Co-Occurrence Analysis of Research on Service Learning: Conceptual Foci and Emerging Research Trends

“…Moreover, the temporal co-word analysis indicated that this is not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, systematic reviews of research were recently published on the use of service learning in engineering education from the perspectives of community engagement [178] and assessment [179]. Nonetheless, given the knowledge and experience that has accumulated on the use of service learning in engineering education, we believe that it would be timely to conduct reviews of research that clarify, summarize, and consolidate what has been learned from the in-depth implementation of service learning in this domain.…”