Designing Service-learning Courses through the Analysis of Service-learning Course Syllabi and Faculty Survey

This study explored the consistency in service-learning courses through comparing course syllabi and faculty survey in order to incorporate a service-learning course into the Home Economics practicum. The first step was to examine how consistent were between the reasons for choice of service-learning and importance of overall civic learning goals, between the importance of civic learning goals and educational objectives on syllabus, and between planned activities and accomplished activities. This study collected the descriptive and quantitative data from the syllabi for service-learning courses and a faculty survey at Texas Tech University. The major findings were that there was meaningful consistency between: the reasons for choosing service-learning and the importance of overall civic learning goals, the importance of civic learning goals and educational objectives, and planned activities on syllabus assignment and accomplished activities on the faculty survey related to course components. Future research regarding service-learning course design would be required in detail, and practice in designing service-learning courses would be consistent between the syllabus and performance in actual courses.