Jeff
I think you pointed out the main problem: expectations. In a Social
Psych course the students might expect some papers/projects but probably
would not expect a 6-8 week project. At Dickinson Service Learning
courses are designated as such in the course catalog so students are
well aware even before they sign up for the course that extra
time/effort is expected outside the class room. That way you also get a
self-selected sample of people enthusiastic about a particular topic
(e.g., my husband teaches a Medical Spanish course in which the students
do medical interpreting among Mexican migrant workers - students are
often quite passionate about broader issues of equity and health care).
As you noted you could set expectations straigh the first day of class
and explain what is expected. That might help but I think it would still
violate a lot of your students' expectations. I have student collected
data in the community in my Cross-Cultural Research Methods course and
last semester we worked very hard to get data from Bosnian refugees
living in the area. Even though most students were very positive there
was one who thought the whole thing was stupid and a waste of time ("we
should just collect data from college students"!). Also because students
do not have a choicec of project many of them will work on an issue that
they probably do not care much about at all. Students tend to be more
positive and take more ownership when they selected the topics
themselves (e.g., in that same course in another semester students
decided to collect data from Mennonites -- an equally difficult
population but I think students felt more in charge because they picked
the population). Here are some suggestions: 1) could you have several
projects that they chose from or could they select their own topic? 2)
could the projects perhaps be of shorter duration and still reach your
goals? 3) might such a project fit better in a research methods course
in which there is an explict expectations that you will collect data?
Good luck
Marie
Jeff Bartel wrote:
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
--
*********************************************
Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
Office: (717) 245-1562, Fax: (717) 245-1971
Webpage: www.dickinson.edu/~helwegm
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