Thanks Michael and Kristen for your pointers.
For my purposes, neither reference would do the work I needed to get done,
despite their interest.
Michael's account is very helpful for developing theory on mechanisms and
conditions of change, but
involves a single student who is a graduate student doing a disseration. The
Giles and Eyler has done
some very interesting work making plausible the intellectual and social
value impact of involvement in
community institutions for a class like our practicum classes, but their
data are soft in that they do not provide
control groups and their modes of measuring outcomes are not closely linked
to any theoretical ideas the
students have to grapple with.
BUT, Giles and Eyler lead to Markus, Howard, & King (1993). Integrating
community service and classroom
instruction...... Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15, 410-419.
These folks organized a clever and
plausible experiment with a large class and found clear impact on test
scores in the class for students who
engaged in community service that was relevant to class content (a poli sci
class).
I believe Giles and Eyler has some later work that would be relevant but it
is in book collections and not available
electronically.
My major goal in this inquiry is to address the deplorable state of
education via large transmission lecture classes
in the social science (and humanities) that test students in dumb ways and
encourage directed forgetting of class
content. My hypothesis is that there are low cost ways (not free, low cost)
to re-mediate undergraduate understandings such that
their school going activity can be transforme into educational activity.
If a way were found to marry Michael's careful analysis of individual cases
to large scale experimental demonstrations of the
kind that move Deans and Provosts, it might be possible to have a
signficiant impact on a situation which has been getting
worse for some time and threatens to get a lot worse soon.
Any more leads warmly appreciated.
mike
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