Service Learning In Engineering Science Courses: Does It Work?

In the fall of 2004 a college with five undergraduate academic programs decided to integrate service-learning (S-L) projects into required engineering courses throughout the curriculum so that students would be exposed to S-L in at least one course in each of eight semesters. The ultimate goal is to graduate better engineers and better citizens. Four of the degree programs have achieved on average one course each semester, with an actual coverage of 103 out of 128 semester courses, or 80% coverage over the four years. Of the 32 required courses in the academic year that had an average of 753 students each semester doing S-L projects related to the subject matter of the course, 19 of the courses (60%) were considered engineering science, that is, not explicitly design or first-year introduction courses. Eighteen different professors taught these engineering science courses with S-L projects, accounting for from 5 to 20% of the grades of the students. In addition, there were nine other elective courses with an additional 40 students on average per semester doing S-L projects. The goal has essentially been reached in four of the five engineering programs at the University of Massachusetts Lowell with more than fifty courses having S-L components. Over two-thirds of the students and faculty members expressed agreement with the basic idea of SLICE, with about 15% opposed. Some forty-three tenure-track faculty members (including 30% untenured) have integrated S-L into at least one required engineering course, averaging four S-L courses each. . Finally, more than two-thirds of the students reported that S-L helped keep them in engineering, and female students reported being significantly more responsive to the S-L projects. This program represents perhaps the largest experiment with S-L in mainstream engineering courses in terms of courses, students, and faculty. This approach is based on a number of hypotheses, which are posited and “tested” with quantitative and qualitative data. Most of the hypotheses are confirmed with data collected to date from this program and literature results.