Taking Part: An Examination of the Changes and Benefits Associated with Participation in Community Service-Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Volunteering and service-learning (a pedagogical practice that combines volunteering with university-level courses) are associated with positive academic, psychological, and prosocial development in university students. Taking part in service-learning and volunteering is generally assumed to contribute to student development (Chapter 1), although little is known about students’ characteristics on entry into service-learning, specifically in comparison to volunteering or non-volunteering students. Characteristics of students who participate in service-learning or volunteering are shaped by institutional factors (Chapter 2) and are in turn related to developmental outcomes (Chapter 3). The unique motives for university student volunteering, particularly self-oriented motives such as career and understanding have likewise received little attention (Chapter 4). This thesis is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 is an overview of key theoretical and practical issues in volunteering and service-learning research, including volunteering and service-learning in Canada and at the University of Ottawa. Chapter 2 is a study of 266 university students enrolled in developmental psychology courses offering elective service-learning. A model of institutional structuring of volunteering and service-learning was developed to examine students’ characteristics at entry into service. The study identified a novel subset of service-learners (service-learners with no prior volunteering engagement) that have yet to be examined in the literature. Chapter 3 is a longitudinal study, using the same sample as Chapter 2, testing developmental change using multi-level linear modelling (students nested in courses) to examine academic, psychological, and prosocial change over one semester, however, few changes were found. Chapter 4 examined volunteering motivations and prosocial tendencies among 270 undergraduate students, with the goal of testing the impact of motivations on wellbeing. Supporting past research, the study demonstrated that other-oriented volunteer motives are associated with well-being, however, some self-oriented volunteer motives (career and understanding motives) were positively associated with well-being contrary to expectations and previous research. Chapter 5 integrates the overall findings from each chapter in a general discussion, exploring: novel contributions of this thesis to the research literature, theoretical and practical issues raised in this dissertation, the connection between results and issues raised in the research literature, and limitations of the results with suggestions for future directions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".