Service-Learning and Chinese College Students' Knowledge Transfer Development

Abstract

As a form of experiential education, service learning (SL) shows great potential for promoting students' knowledge transfer as it offers students opportunities to apply what they have learned in classrooms to serve communities in real-life contexts. To explore how students' knowledge transfer evolves during SL, we collected longitudinal survey data from 96 Chinese college students in a 9-week SL program. Results indicate that (a) students' perceived knowledge transfer in SL did not follow a linear trajectory. Although students' perceived knowledge transfer at the end of SL was significantly higher than those at the beginning, a slight drop was observed in the middle of SL; (b) the developmental pattern of perceived knowledge transfer varied across students; and (c) students' perceived knowledge transfer development during SL was associated with mastery goal orientation and perceptions of psychologically controlling behaviors from their SL supervisors. By providing evidence of the dynamic process and mechanisms of students' knowledge transfer development, the present study adds to our understanding of how, when, and why the benefits of SL are realized.

Mixed methods research in service-learning: an integrative systematic review

“…Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus (Butin 2010;Puig 2009; Speck and Hoppe 2004) on the need to identify S-L methodology as an educational methodology that challenges traditional pedagogical discourses; a methodology that expands the scope of teaching activity beyond the classroom (Wang et al 2020), generates spaces for the development of social engagement (Marco-Gardoqui et al 2020) and ethical behaviours (Lee et al 2020), promotes autonomy, self-efficacy (Gerholz 2017), engagement (Folgueiras et al 2018) and critical thinking (Kuntjara 2019), generates satisfaction with the learning achieved (Lorenzo-Moledo et al 2021), and facilitates meaningful learning (Celio et al 2011). This methodology "is based on the idea that mutual assistance is a better mechanism for personal, economic, and social progress than competition and the obsessive pursuit of success" (Puig 2009: 10).…”

How Students’ Motivation and Learning Experience Affect Their Service-Learning Outcomes: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

“…Service-learning is recognized as a high-impact educational practice ( Anderson et al, 2019 ) and it promote positive educational results for students from widely varying backgrounds ( Kuh and Schneider, 2008 ). It is increasingly adopted in universities across the world ( Furco et al, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2020 ; Sotelino-Losada et al, 2021 ) and has received significant attention from both academics and researchers in different academic disciplines ( Yorio and Ye, 2012 ; Geller et al, 2016 ; Rutti et al, 2016 ), and an increasing number of institutions have formally designated service-learning courses as part of the curriculum ( Nejmeh, 2012 ; Campus Compact, 2016 ).…”