Assessing community service type of experiential learning

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed an international movement towards curriculum transformation and renewal in higher education, such as the UK Dearing Report in the mid-1990s and the Nelson Reforms in Australia in 2003. Hong Kong’s higher education system is no exception. In the current climate, these transformations include the need to raise the quality of undergraduate education to meet the demands of a knowledge-based economy. These transformations are not just within the discipline-knowledge, but also in the graduate attributes that students must possess to cope in this highly-evolving society. These graduate attributes (also known as generic skills/ transferable skills/ key-skills/ soft-skills) are of growing concern to employers, government, students and teachers, and they are high on the agenda in the new Hong Kong 3+3+4 curriculum. With these transformations in mind, diverse forms of learning and teaching activities have been try out to target both the discipline-knowledge and the graduate attributes in a more active way of learning. One of these learning and teaching activities is experiential learning. Experiential learning is not new, in fact, this type of learning has been well-realised for more than two thousand years ago. As according to our famous Chinese philosopher and teacher – Confucius, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” - Confucius Experiential learning is learning by actual experience. This is the most practical and efficient form of learning process to make sense of what is learnt from class and text book. Through participation in real life activities, students gain further understanding by utilizing the academic context learnt. Unlike traditional classroom-based learning which is often didactic, passive and fosters rote learning, the process of experiential learning is much more effective and long-lasting as it focuses on stimulating senses, experience and reflection by creating a meaningful learning experience. The experience created can be either positive or negative, as even negative experiences can have a powerful impact on learning. Despite there has been a tremendous escalation in the need and attention for community service learning over the last decades as the benefits of such learning have been merited by students, faculty, employers and communities, there is still a lack of direction on how community service learning should be assessed, aligned with the appropriate learning outcomes and accredited within the curriculum in higher education. The study is conducted on the basis of service experience by a group of university students and instructors from a university in Hong Kong. They participated in a post-earthquake reconstruction project at Sichuan, China. It documents the different assessment methods used in the course of experiential learning, as well as the impact of experiential learning on the attitudes and awareness for both students and instructors.