College students are poised to take on important leadership roles in society, and as such, it is vital that they understand the interests and needs of people throughout the life course and that they do not harbor ageist believes that may play out in the policies they enact, the services they provide, or the products they create. Many college…

Service-learning (SL) activities provide multifarious benefits for students, faculty members, and community members. Although the literature includes considerable research on students' and faculty members' outcomes, it also reports a lack of attention to benefits for community members. This study sought to address this gap, giving voice to…

High-impact practices (HIPs) are educationally purposeful activities that college students experience in and out of the classroom which are found to be positively related to several learning outcomes including: better gain of academic knowledge and artistic skills, recognition of community issues and real-world problems, career success and…

Our multi-institutional study addresses the question: How do college students' backgrounds, collegiate engagement, and perceptions of the campus climate relate to the development of an activist orientation? Activism is framed as engagement in collective, sociopolitical action and measured using the Activism Orientation Scale (AOS). Meaningful…

This two-part investigation extended research demonstrating the civic impact of college students' spiritual commitments. The initial study served as a large-scale assessment (n = 768) of political involvement using a new Inventory of Political Activity. The smaller-scale, follow-up study (n = 129) used two validated measures of spiritual…

Catalan young adults have found themselves as prominent actors in important social, political and economic changes that Catalonia is currently experiencing. How are their life goals related to these events? We explore self-oriented, prosocial and change-oriented life goals and their expected social benefits among 160 Catalan university students…

This article asserts that academics should constitute the majority of the teaching team of university service-learning curriculum. Using appraisals for service-learning courses for eight recent years at Shantou University, we apply the methods of one-way variance analysis and correlation analysis to analyze the data. The results show that…

This investigation explores oral proficiency outcomes in short-term study abroad programs, as well as the interaction of those outcomes with the type of second language (L2) courses involved. For three years, speaking ability gains were measured in a study abroad setting among intermediate learners of Spanish under two different course conditions:…

Community engagement through service-learning has been a mainstay of higher education for the past 20 years and has increasingly proven successful in grounding academic knowledge in community experience. This article explores how service-learning programs designed to shape students' sense of responsibility for the common good can also foster their…

Relational Developmental Systems (RDS) provided an integrative framework to examine how college students' intrapersonal attributes, particularly sense of identity in transactions with different educational experiences, were related with self-reported community and political engagement and other intrapersonal dimensions. Students who participated…

This study applied self-determination theory to youth purpose development among Korean college students. It examined the effects of students' intrinsic motivation for volunteering and informative feedback from significant others on three dimensions of life purpose: confidence in purpose, commitment to purpose and social contribution. The study…

Education abroad is a high-impact practice that can lead to transformational learning because it challenges students emotionally and intellectually. However, differences in program design may have differential impacts on students' learning. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationships between design features of education abroad…

A partnership between a regional Australian university and the Friendship Village in Vietnam was established in 2016 as part of a health promotion unit of study. The aim of this project was to evaluate the sustainability of the international service learning model of health promotion, and its impacts upon the students and the Friendship Village.…

Short-term service-learning experiences such as alternative breaks are increasing in popularity due to the focus on service in higher education and the institution's responsibility to ensure students are graduating with the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly competitive, global economy and contribute to a democratic society as citizens…

In this study, we investigated the impact of past and current service-learning on the civic attitudes of African American college women: 44 students enrolled in either service-learning or non-service-learning courses were given pretests and posttests measuring civic attitudes. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to examine the…