The Impact of Adopting an Experiential Service Learning Group Project on Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

It is a well-established fact that learning is facilitated when the student participates completely in the learning process and is confronted with practical problems. "Experiential Learning" occurs when students participate in some activity, reflect upon the activity, use their analytical skills to derive some useful insight from the experience, and then incorporate their new understanding(s) into real business situations. The incorporation of "Service Learning" which is using the "Experiential Learning" conceptual framework has become widespread in numerous colleges and universities. Nevertheless, while there has been a steady increase in the understanding of how service-learning affects students and communities, there remains a dearth of research on how using "Service Learning" pedagogy impacts faculty. Few studies have focused on the faculty side of "Service Learning". The literature review of this paper indicated a significant lack of any evidence that illustrates the impact of adopting a service learning project on a student's perception of an instructor's teaching effectiveness. The overall purpose of this article was to assess such impact. The result of this experimental study strongly suggests that inclusion of a "Service Learning" project in a marketing course, in addition to creating a unique and distinguishable factor in a student's mind regarding civic engagement, will positively change their perception of the instructor's teaching effectiveness too. The second conclusion is that the necessary resources including all relevant information, readings, guidelines, plans, and forms should carefully be created with easy access to them by students(e.g., via a website).