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.

Post-Graduation Impact of a Program Planning Service-Learning Project

“…A qualitative study on the impact of service-learning on personal and professional development among undergraduate students in a nutrition program found that students expressed feelings of purpose or impact and a significant gain of real-world experience (Roofe, 2012). Community-based service-learning projects have been shown to help epidemiology graduate and undergraduate students gain experience outside of the classroom, while benefiting both their learning and their understanding of public health field work (Ylitalo & Meyer, 2019).…”

“…Research has shown that participation in service-learning experiences has yielded significant increases in student learning outcomes (Astin et al, 1999; Giles & Eyler, 1998; Gottlieb & Robinson, 2006; Tucker, 2010; Ylitalo & Meyer, 2019). In fact, service-learning opportunities in colleges and universities have been increasing since the mid-1980s and are standard in several health-related disciplines, such as physical therapy, nursing, and public health (de Groot et al, 2015; Fralinger et al, 2013; Reising et al, 2008; Tapley & Patel, 2016).…”

Service Learning in Public Health: A Critical Assessment of Potential Benefits and Unintended Consequences

“…Service learning can enable students to gain real-world experience, increase career readiness, contextualize topics taught in class, and improve perceptions of their ability to link theory to practice ( Brown, 2017 ; Gasparis et al, 2017 ; Hart, 2015 ; Salam et al, 2019 ). Service learning in allied health fields has also been shown to increase students’ cultural competence and perceptions of civic responsibility, aid in their professional development, improve their understanding of the delivery of ethical care, and increase their ability to intervene on health equity related issues ( Bill & Casola, 2016 ; Lohr et al, 2022 ; Ylitalo & Meyer, 2019 ). However, one study found that adding a service learning component to a class did not improve test scores, compared to the class without the service learning component ( Lambright, 2008 ).…”

Evaluating differences in community-engaged learning and service-learning via the context, input, process, and product model

“…Thus, SL participants develop complex cognitive strategies that require questioning what they have learned and their role in the social and environmental framework" (Sotelino-Losada et al, 2021). Common outcomes of SL include opportunities for students to gain real-world application (Cain, 2013;Hwang et al, 2019;Ylitalo and Meyer, 2019), increase in engagement (Peterson et al, 2014;Hwang et al, 2019), improved critical thinking and problem-solving skills (Cain, 2013;Peterson et al, 2014), and professional development (Cain, 2013;Ylitalo and Meyer, 2019). SL's influence has spread to a vast number of disciplines.…”