by Laura Rog

In my final blog post in a series on assessing service-learning, I’m excited to tie up the topic and bring focus to engaging youth in experiences relative to their lives. Let’s quickly recap to catch everyone up to speed, especially if this is the first time you’ve joined this blog thread.

Over the last two months, I’ve focused on the importance of assessing service and service-learning initiatives, and used Westheimer and Kahne’s article, Educating the “Good” Citizen: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals, two months ago to frame assessment around two key outcomes to improve service-learning experiences: justice-oriented thought and civic action.

Then last month, I examined the first part of these two criteria by using the Rigor/Relevance model from the International Center for Leadership in Education to illustrate how to engage and measure critical thinking outcomes during service experiences. This month, we’ll come full circle to not only assess at what level students are thinking during their service experiences, but help provide rigorous and real ways these thoughts can be applied in their communities.

Continuing to focus on the Rigor/Relevance Framework, we not only need to pay attention to how youth are thinking on the Knowledge Taxonomy, but what they are doing with this knowledge. On the Application Model (the horizontal axis when looking at the tool), the Framework lays out five levels of how knowledge is applied. The critical piece in application is designing experiences that will produce outcomes that are relevant and real to the youth themselves. This occurs as youth are able to begin connecting knowledge outside of stagnant subject categories. Looking at the Framework, this starts under number 3:

Applying Across Disciplines, where youth can use knowledge to benefit more than one area of learning. For example, youth could use science facts they found from research in their library (health, biology) to write persuasive essays (English Language Arts) about what students should do to exercise and eat healthier.

As youth begin to reach these levels of application, learning isn’t done for a specific class, but rather is used in complex and intersecting ways. At the next level, simple service projects can begin stretching this application even further:

Applying to Real-World Predictable Situations, where youth can apply their knowledge to a real-world setting where there is only one outcome. For example, a community center might have youth research teenage eating and exercise habits (health, statistics) to create a display to promote healthy eating and exercise (art, graphic design, computer skills). The data gathering applies knowledge to a real-world situation, and the students have a predictable outcome in creating a display.

And finally, advancing down the continuum, it becomes clearly evident that high quality service and service-learning lends itself to the highest levels of application and engagement by engaging youth in civic action in their communities:

Applying to Real-World Unpredictable Situations, where youth not only apply their knowledge in cross-disciplinary ways, but also seek answers to situations with unpredictable outcomes. To continue on with our example, students would gather data from peers about their exercise and eating habits (health, statistics), and then create a campaign to change their peers’ habits. This applies their knowledge to the real world, but also challenges them to apply it at the highest level where they cannot predict the outcome and must problem-solve, analyze, and synthesize throughout the experience to produce a change in their peers’ behaviors.

Taken together, both the Rigor/Relevance Framework’s Knowledge Taxonomy and Application Model allow us as practitioners to assess the critical thinking and application to real circumstances youth are able to engage in through service. Central to the themes Westheimer and Kahne address in their study to examine civically engaged youth, it is imperative for us as service practitioners to give focus to quality outcomes.

Admittedly, when I started this current blog thread on assessing service-learning (now spreading into a THIRD post!), I hadn’t planned on expanding the topic past a simple single blog commentary and explanation of how to use two tools to inform assessment in your own service-learning experiences. But as the writing wore on, and the tools came to life in the context of youth critically thinking about and engaging within their communities, it has been a fantastic opportunity to also think more deeply about the purpose of assessment in the first place.

Assessment is a way to engage in the complicated process of defining meaning within service and service-learning experiences and measure outcomes that support the use of both strategies with youth. If we aren’t striving toward outcomes where youth can think critically and act civically, we lose sight of service as a central way they can systemically change the communities around them while also growing as individuals. As I move onto a new topic next month, I encourage readers to keep these two key pieces – critical thought and civic action – central to the design and assessment of how your youth are engaging in the world around them. Please feel free to contact me for further discussion, and I welcome feedback on how these tools might fit into your service and service-learning efforts.

Laura Rog is the Director of Training and Technical Assistance with generationOn and a featured blogger.