The students were happy, but did they change positively?

Abstract

At The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a 2-credit General Education subject entitled "Service Leadership" was developed to promote service leadership qualities (including leadership competencies, moral character, and caring disposition) in university students. The subject was piloted in one class with 60 students in the 2012/2013 academic year. Pretest and posttest data utilizing measures of positive youth development, life satisfaction, and service leadership qualities were collected. Positive changes in the program participants were found, particularly for measures in behavioral competence, moral competence, character strengths, general positive youth development qualities, and overall service leadership qualities. The present study provided preliminary support for the effectiveness of the subject in nurturing service leadership qualities of Chinese university students in Hong Kong.

General Education Learning Outcomes and Demographic Correlates in University Students in Hong Kong

“…Basically, the ethical requirement and self-leadership, which refers to one's ability to manage oneself and improve one's full range of competencies, are two most important qualities highlighted by service leadership theory. Thus, ethical leadership and selfleadership scales were developed to evaluate service leadership education and the two scales showed good reliability in previous studies (Shek et al 2014a(Shek et al , 2017. Ethical leadership scale consisted of 15 items using a 6-point Likert scale whereas selfleadership scale included 5 items adopting a 5-point Likert rating scale.…”

Does Service Leadership Education Contribute to Student Well-Being? A Quasi-Experimental Study Based on Hong Kong University Students

“…Participants were required to report to what extent they agree or disagree with the five statements (e.g., "The conditions of my life are excellent") on a 6-point Likert scale. Positive youth development was assessed by a 10-item trimmed-version of Chinese Positive Youth Development Scale that has been used in previous studies evaluating the effectiveness of the course "Service Leadership" (Shek et al 2017a;Shek et al 2014). Each item measures one positive youth development attribute, including social competence, cognitive competence, emotional competence, behavioral competence, moral competence, self-determination, belief in the future, clear and positive identity, spirituality, and resilience.…”

Service leadership education for university students in Hong Kong: qualitative evaluation

“…The findings are expected to provide more evidence concerning the evaluation of this subject, in addition to those generated from other studies adopting objective outcome evaluation [29], subjective outcome evaluation [30] and process evaluation [31].…”

“…The effectiveness of this course has been tested through multiple strategies, including objective outcome evaluation, subjective outcome evaluation and process evaluation [29][30][31]. In contrast to quantitative ratings on the course effectiveness, this study examined course effectiveness through qualitative evaluation, in which participating students used descriptors and metaphors to describe their perceptions and feelings toward this course.…”

“…The present findings are consistent with those based on other evaluation strategies. Based on some objective measures, Shek [29] showed that the students changed in the positive direction after taking this subject. Similarly, post-course subjective outcome evaluation findings showed that the students had positive perceptions of the lectures, teachers and benefits of the subject [30].…”