Peter Felten, Assistant Provost and Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, has co-authored a chapter on service-learning in Evidence-Based Teaching, edited by J.E. Groccia and W. Buskitt of Auburn University.
This volume, part of the series New Directions for Teaching and Learning (#128, Winter 2011), explores the need for and potential of making pedagogical decisions based on empirical research into student learning.
Felten and co-author Patti Clayton, Senior Scholar at the Center for Service and Learning at IUPUI, synthesize the scholarship on service-learning to highlight the learning outcomes associated with well-designed service-learning experiences. They note, for example, that students in service-learning course perform comparably to peers in lecture courses on fact-based and other lower-order learning tasks, but experience far more gains than those same peers in critical thinking, civic engagement, and personal development. Felten and Clayton conclude by suggesting future lines of research on service-learning and principles of good practice with this pedagogy.
Evidence-Based Teaching is available electronically through Belk Library and in print in CATL.