All students make the commitment to achieve at least 100 service hours by the start of their senior year. Within these hours, each student must participate in one core service experience (at least 40 hours with the same nonprofit agency, working directly with clients in need, in conjunction with a reflection journal). Details of the requirement, including various policies and forms, can be found here.
Every student at St Ignatius, as a part of their core service experience, must maintain a service reflection journal in conjunction with core volunteering activities. Formal assessment of student journals has been limited to the CSP Director reading each journal and providing general feedback. As part of the midterm report, the Christian Service office decided to formally craft a rubric as a tool to assess student reflection journals and to determine how effective our service journals are in helping students achieve the above ESLR.
• Core Service is a hands-on learning experience in which students are immersed in a new environment that challenges them to be open to new, divergent points of view.
• Through service and the accompanying journal, students spend time evaluating their experience in order to make connections to their own growth as a person for others.
• Students learn that service requires an attitude of authentic respect and tolerance towards each person they meet throughout their core experience.
Description of Assessment:
In November 2003, Christian Service Director, Jenny Girard, crafted a rubric to assess the following qualities of service journals: Tolerance, Growth, Practical Application, Community, Generosity and Authenticity (each characteristic is believed to be an important facet of developing persons who are open to growth).
Students were rated using the following rubric:
1= Vague/Insincere
2= Sophomoric (Naïve, Teenaged)
3= In-depth (Thoughtful)
4= Sophisticated (Fully Integrated; Mature)
Once this rubric was developed, 30 student journals were selected (at random). 10 journals each from grades 10-12 were selected. 53% were male students and 47% were female students. As well, we worked to diversify the type of volunteer activity students participated in, aiming to include a mix of summer camp (40%) and on-going, school-year volunteer experiences (60%). Lastly, we took notice of the format of the service journals, including the recent 2003 addition (60% of journals) with the past 2001 edition (40%). 6 faculty readers were recruited as readers. Faculty were placed in one of two teams and were asked to read 15 journals while rating the journal to the rubric. Each team read the same journals and their rubrics were averaged together to determine the students' core on each characteristic.
This project was very unique in that there are very few research efforts aimed at assessing and qualifying student reflections on service. As this project was developed, we looked into possible models of journal rubrics and characteristics to track and found little in the body of service-learning pedagogy. Therefore, we undertook the job of crafting a rubric that details the qualities we hope our students achieve during their service experience. We also worked to bring in a variety of readers in order to create a diverse group of teachers who would rate each student journal. This project has definitely helped us to see a clear connection between volunteer activity and student learning. It is one of the first opportunities to review how St Ignatius is truly supporting our students to act as (and reflect on) “persons for others.”
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This project was very educational and very successful from the viewpoint of the Christian Service Office. In the future, we hope to continue similar readings and rubric analysis in order to track our student successes during volunteer activity. Through this project, the Christian Service Office will look into creating options for alternate means of reflection (in addition to the journal format). As well, we will look to create journals that may correlate with the year in which the core service is completed and therefore ask questions that connect to the development level of the various students. Other possibilities of further research include an analysis of the readers raw data to gather any insight as to how we, as adults, rate student reflections. Also, it may be interesting to have CSP staff read the journals as well, rate each journal to the rubric, and compare to see where that rating falls in relation to the readers scores.
Overall, the project was a great first step to formalizing assessment of student journals and student service activity at St Ignatius. Hopefully this will be the foundation upon which future inquiry can develop.