Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
Fall 1999, pp. 142-143
Book Review
Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?
Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles, Jr.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999
As another semester reaches its end, a student sits in
my office describing her work as a chaplain with low
income patients at San Francisco General Hospital.
Her face glows as she talks about the kind of
changes that have taken place for her in a single
semester: her new sense of competence, her growing
conviction that she needs to learn more about health
care policy to become better able to address the
inequities in medical care, her new awareness of the
relationship between her theology major and the
kinds of existential questions raised by encounters
with illness and death, and her increased comfort in
relating to people whose race and social class are
different from her own. After many similar conversations, I've often wished that I had some way to
document the power in this kind of learning, in order
to share it with other faculty and administrators.
The majority of those who have worked with students involved in service-learning have a sense of
the significant shifts in intellectual, personal and
moral development that take place over the course of
a well-structured service-learning experience. What
they have lacked is empirical data that demonstrates
what they have already known intuitively and anecdotally. The research findings in this book go a long
way toward addressing that need.
As the largest and most comprehensive study to
date on the student outcomes of service-learning,
this book could not be more timely. Service-learning
continues to be adopted on a growing number of
campuses (Campus Compact's most recent survey
revealed a total of 11,800 service-learning courses
taught at 575 member institutions). Service-learning
has become part of the agenda of all of the major
higher education organizations, and is featured in
their literature and at their conferences (e.g. the
American Association for Higher Education has
recently completed publication of an eighteen volume series on service-learning in the disciplines).
The field has had its own refereed journal - the
Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
- since 1994. And yet in spite of these measures of
success, in many ways the field remains marginal
and suspect in many academic circles. One hopes
that this work, by two of the most important
researchers in the field, will contribute to strength
ening the case for service-learning.
The research on which the book is based comes
from three studies conducted by the authors in the
mid-1990's. In 1994, Eyler and Giles conducted preliminary interviews with students enrolled in service-learning courses to determine the kinds of
learning outcomes to examine in subsequent studies.
Then, pre- and post surveys were done during the
spring semester of 1995 with 1500 students, 1100 of
whom were taking part in service-learning courses.
Students were enrolled in a diversity of higher education institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to
large research universities. To supplement the information from this larger study, extended problemsolving interviews were done with 66 students
before and after their service-learning experience.
Finally, the authors incorporated the results of onetime reflective interviews with 67 students that were
done as part of a research project for the Corporation
for National Service. The book makes excellent use
of quotations from the personal interviews to illustrate the findings of the larger survey.
This book is divided into nine chapters, the first of
which sets the context for the book and describes the
research design. The next six chapters address learning outcomes in the following areas: personal and
interpersonal development (Chapter Two); understanding and applying knowledge (Chapter Three);
engagement, curiosity and reflective practice
(Chapter Four); critical thinking (Chapter Five); perspective transformation (Chapter Six); and citizenship (Chapter Seven). Chapter Eight takes a different
approach, asking how certain program characteristics, most of which have been included in discussions of effective practice, affect student learning
outcomes. In Chapter Nine, the authors speak directly to the question of what their research findings tell
us about strengthening the role of service in the curriculum. Generous appendices provide copies of the
survey instruments and detailed statistical analyses
of the data.
The authors present a rich array of findings in
each of their research categories, a sample of which
are highlighted here. With regard to personal and
interpersonal development, the authors state:
"Students report that their service-learning con
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