Start Date
7-6-2013 5:25 PM
End Date
7-6-2013 6:35 PM
Description
As the Hong Kong society continues to promote the culture of caring for the needy, more students are encouraged to participate in voluntary services during their primary and secondary school study. These students have experiences to serve the needy in forms of social gathering activities, tour guiding & language tutorial…etc, which enhance their confidence and motivation to attempt service learning projects in future.
Based on surveyed figures of the students participated in different service learning projects in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, at the early stage of the projects, it is revealed that these students would easily overlook the dimension of professional knowledge applications, sustainable impacts to beneficiary and learning achievements. This indicates that their pre-university voluntary service experiences may be the barriers for their learning process in service learning projects that they have tendency to omit the learning dimension in service learning and to overly focus on service delivery. Teachers of service learning subjects in university need to handle this phenomenon carefully especially for the projects consisted of students from multi-disciplines. In order to let students smoothly transit from the role of volunteers to effective service learners, teachers should take these figures into consideration when designing their course frame work, course syllabus and teaching approaches accordingly.
Information collected from narrative reflection submissions at different stages in service learning project provides objective information to measure the extent of students’ generic growth, professional knowledge application and their learning achievement from service learning. These interim data also provides an indicator to teachers for striking a balance between teacher intervention and students autonomy at the service delivery stage. It would be the important information to evaluate the learning outcome at the final stage too. The figures of post project survey would also provide effective evaluation information of whole service learning period. These accumulated data from different projects formed a database for teachers’ preparation and operation in the future projects.
The figures used in this paper come from service learning projects in Hong Kong, mainland China and Indonesia. These figures were measured from pre and post project surveys and narrative reflective journals at different project stages. This paper will discuss the figures in details and the corresponding teachers’ responses. Part of the post project figures evaluated the effectiveness of transiting students from volunteers to effective service learners.
Recommended Citation
Lam, J., Lee, W. Y. W., & Leung, R. (2013, June). Figures in international service project. Paper presented at the 4th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Service-Learning: Service-Learning as a Bridge from Local to Global: Connected world, Connected future, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.
Included in
Figures in international service project
As the Hong Kong society continues to promote the culture of caring for the needy, more students are encouraged to participate in voluntary services during their primary and secondary school study. These students have experiences to serve the needy in forms of social gathering activities, tour guiding & language tutorial…etc, which enhance their confidence and motivation to attempt service learning projects in future.
Based on surveyed figures of the students participated in different service learning projects in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, at the early stage of the projects, it is revealed that these students would easily overlook the dimension of professional knowledge applications, sustainable impacts to beneficiary and learning achievements. This indicates that their pre-university voluntary service experiences may be the barriers for their learning process in service learning projects that they have tendency to omit the learning dimension in service learning and to overly focus on service delivery. Teachers of service learning subjects in university need to handle this phenomenon carefully especially for the projects consisted of students from multi-disciplines. In order to let students smoothly transit from the role of volunteers to effective service learners, teachers should take these figures into consideration when designing their course frame work, course syllabus and teaching approaches accordingly.
Information collected from narrative reflection submissions at different stages in service learning project provides objective information to measure the extent of students’ generic growth, professional knowledge application and their learning achievement from service learning. These interim data also provides an indicator to teachers for striking a balance between teacher intervention and students autonomy at the service delivery stage. It would be the important information to evaluate the learning outcome at the final stage too. The figures of post project survey would also provide effective evaluation information of whole service learning period. These accumulated data from different projects formed a database for teachers’ preparation and operation in the future projects.
The figures used in this paper come from service learning projects in Hong Kong, mainland China and Indonesia. These figures were measured from pre and post project surveys and narrative reflective journals at different project stages. This paper will discuss the figures in details and the corresponding teachers’ responses. Part of the post project figures evaluated the effectiveness of transiting students from volunteers to effective service learners.