Service-learning combines community service with academic course content and emphasizes critical reflection. Service learning is mutually beneficial, simultaneously enhancing the community through the service provided and functioning as a powerful learning tool with meaningful consequences for students. Students grow to view the community as an expanded classroom in which they apply knowledge in a real-world context, understand the complex nature of social problems, and examine their roles as citizens.
Service-learning has been show to have a positive effect on students in the following ways:
Sources: Astin & Sax, 1998; Eyler, Giles, & Braxton, 1997; Vogelgesang & Astin, 2000; Eyler, Root, & Giles, 1998; Roose et al, 1997