Hello,
When I taught Social Psychology last year, I decided to add a service
learning component to the course. Having heard some good things about
service learning in general, and being the tree hugger that I am, I
required students to use social influence techniques to try to increase
recycling somewhere in the area. There are a lot of reasons that I
chose recycling as the class topic, but one of them is that it was much
less political than some of the other suggestions I had heard. This
might have been a mistake. (More on that in a minute.)
To briefly summarize the assignment, after we covered methods,
attitudes, persuasion, social influence, and groups, students had to
take a baseline measure of recycling in some area for a week or two,
implement a week or two intervention designed to increase recycling, and
then measure recycling for another week or two. The result was written
up in an APA-style paper (student handout at
http://www.ship.edu/~jsbart/social/finalpaper.pdf). More detail is
available under the "semester project" section on the class website:
http://www.ship.edu/~jsbart/social/
Here's the problem. Despite being largely successful at meeting the
goals I had for the project (they're listed on the survey I administered
after the semester, http://tinyurl.com/bfkh4 , if you're curious), and
despite generally good performance (and grades) by the groups, the
project was almost universally disliked by the students. Part of the
problem is that it's a 200-level class, and the (mostly) freshman and
sophomore students have typically only had General Education survey
courses (i.e., mostly lecture, little active learning). Part of the
problem was that very few students had had any methods/stats courses,
though I obviously provided assistance in this area (even offering to
help with the stats for groups who had not had stat/methods classes).
For instance, I gave them a description of how to do t-tests in Excel
rather than requiring SPSS
(http://www.ship.edu/~jsbart/social/t-test.xls). As with all group
work, the logistics of getting together are difficult, and though I
required them to develop a plan to reduce social loafing (after we had
covered this in class, of course; http://tinyurl.com/c8rkx ), a few
groups still had difficulty getting everyone on board.
A colleague suggested that my problem may have been even more
fundamental: they just couldn't get enthusiastic about recycling for the
6-8 weeks it took to complete the project. I'm willing to accept a
little student grousing about the other issues because I can work with
them at the beginning of the semester this time to ensure that their
expectations are appropriate for the amount of work this project will
take (it is worth an exam, or 20% of the grade, after all, and acquiring
the ability to work in groups is something they obviously need to do).
However, I think that I should be a little more flexible with the topic.
So, my question to you (finally) is how those of you who have used
service learning -- in Social Psych or in other classes -- handle the
selection of topics. What have your students done? I'm open to letting
them do pretty much anything within reason that qualifies as (1) service
and (2) an application of Social Psych principles. I'd prefer that the
service also (3) make use of social influence and (4) be able to have
its effectiveness empirically assessed. I'd be willing to budge on (3)
& (4), though I'm not sure how the final paper would look. One other
note: a lot service learning seems to be heavy on the service and light
on the learning. I have to say that I'm inclined toward the opposite
approach.
<plug> Before someone mentions it, I've already checked out Jonathan
Mueller's excellent Resources for the Teaching of Social Psychology
(http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/). Surprisingly,
there's relatively little on service learning, though I highly recommend
it, and his newsletter, for ideas for teaching pretty much anything else
in Social Psychology. </plug>
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
--
Jeffrey Bartel
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology, FSC 119
Shippensburg University
1871 Old Main Dr.
Shippensburg, PA 17257
jsbart @ ship.edu / 717.477.1324
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