Jocelyn Paul, Elizabeth Bowering
Service Learning (SL) is a high impact educational practice in which students work on “real world” activities with a community partner (i.e., the service component) and then reflect on that experience (i.e., the learning component). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the influence of a SL experience on the development of empathy in university students. Here, students registered in an Introductory Psychology course at a Canadian university engaged with international students new to Canada and reflected on how culture mediates human behavior. Specifically, we randomly assigned students to experiential or non-experiential (control) learning formats, with the groups otherwise treated equivalently. We hypothesized that participants (n = 16 females) who took part in five hours of structured, small group interaction with international students would demonstrate increased empathy on questionnaire measures, relative to similarly aged controls (n = total of 55 females).
When asked to reflect specifically on their SL experience, experiential participants reported significantly greater understanding of racial and cultural differences as well as greater support for the statement that “humans are more alike than different regardless of their culture”. Additionally, SL participants reported increased ability to imagine another’s situation and perceive their thoughts and feelings, as well as an increased desire to be kind and helpful to others (all p’s < .002) compared to the control respondents. As expected, SL participants did not report superior organizational, problem-solving, and/or communication skills compared to the control respondents (because the SL experience was not designed to facilitate development of these skills). Finally, as measured by standardized questionnaires, participants in the experiential condition did not express significantly higher levels of empathy compared to control participants.
Our findings indicate that even a brief SL intervention implemented in a first year course can significantly increase perspective-taking and empathy in women, at least in the short term, as assessed by a measure contextualized to the SL experience. In contrast, standardized empathy questionnaires may lack sufficient specificity for use in a SL context such as described in the current study. Our future research is intended to clarify the process by which SL encourages the development of empathetic thoughts and feelings in university students.
