Impact of Student Connectedness on Service-Learning Outcomes: A Multiple Regression Study

Abstract: Connectedness is an essential aspect of student engagement, which is known to significantly impact retention, learning, and persistence. However, how one can measure connectedness and how it affects the various learning outcomes in the context of service-learning is understudied. As such, this paper examines how students’ perceptions of their connectedness with their teachers, peers, and service recipients affect their self-reported intellectual, social, civic, and intrapersonal outcomes in service-learning courses via a posttest design and multiple regression framework. We find that variations in students’ connectedness can statistically explain learning outcomes. Specifically, connectedness to service recipients has the highest overall impact—strongest in civic-related outcomes, followed by intrapersonal, intellectual, and social outcomes. Connectedness felt in the classroom and with instructors also plays a significant role in non-civic related outcomes. However, connectedness to peers is negatively related to learning outcomes on average but not always statistically significant. Findings from this study suggest more work is needed to understand the mechanism through which connectedness matters for learning outcomes in service-learning, both theoretically and empirically, as well as ways through which they can be enhanced.

Narrative: This study investigates how students’ perceptions of their connectedness with their teachers, peers and service recipients affect their service-learning outcomes. Connectedness is an important factor of student engagement and its impacts on retention, learning and persistence are heavily studied in the education literature, especially when it concerns distance learning (Hehir, Zeller, Luckhurst, & Chandler, 2021; Mandernach, 2015; Payne, 2019). Connectedness is also the perception of belonging (Lee & Robbins, 1995) and is considered an effective way to achieve social benefits and well-being (Frieling, Peach, & Cording, 2018; Jose, Ryan, & Pryor, 2012; Pavey, Greitemeyer, & Sparks, 2011; Su & Wang, 2022), as well as a sense of community in the classroom (Rovai, 2002), school (Maroulis & Gomez, 2008) and the society (Flaherty, Zwick, & Bouchey, 2014).

Given the heavy emphasis service-learning places on student engagement in the classroom and society, as well as its benefits for both the students and the community, it is perhaps surprising that connectedness has not garnered more attention in the realm of service-learning. The question of connectedness and learning outcome should also be of particular interest due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of e-Service-Learning when physical distancing and isolation were inevitable. Given how vital connectedness is across many aspects of people’s lives, and how little we know about it in the context of service-learning, we hope to achieve the following through this study:
1. Examine students’ sense of connectedness to instructors, peers, and the communities served during their service-learning experience;
2. Evaluate whether and how differences in students’ connectedness affect their learning outcomes that are traditionally salient in the service-learning literature.

Methods
This study employed a one-group posttest-only design, using multiple linear regression analysis as the main method of inquiry.

Participants were 325 undergraduate students enrolled in two credit-bearing service-learning courses in a large public research university in Hong Kong. A typical service-learning course in the university is structured with 60 hours of teaching and service project preparation, 40 hours of service implementation and 20 hours of reflection and evaluation. It is intended that upon completing the course, students will be able to, at the minimum, apply the knowledge and skills they have acquired to deal with complex issues in the service setting, reflect on their roles and responsibilities both as a professional in their chosen discipline and as a responsible citizen, demonstrate empathy for people in need and a strong sense of civic responsibility, and demonstrate an understanding of the linkage between service-learning and the academic content of the subject.

Specifically, the two service-learning courses examined in this study aim to not only teach students scientific thinking principles and programming knowledge, but also to increase their understanding of the digital and scientific divide within and beyond the Hong Kong society. The classroom learning and the service reinforce each other through a service project, which involves university students designing and conducting hands-on STEM workshops for upper-primary or lower-secondary school students (service recipients) on concepts related to A.I. object recognition, machine-learning, and block programming skills. In general, about 3-4 university students make up one team to carry out 4-6 weekly workshops to a group of 5-6 service recipients. In the end, a full-day event was arranged where university students coached the service recipients in a competition that required them to fine-tune the remote-controlled robotic car and A.I. program for object recognition they had been working on during the workshops to perform specific tasks according to judging criteria.

Students’ service-learning outcomes were measured by the Process and Outcomes from Service-Learning (POSL) Questionnaire developed by the university’s research team with reference to the past literature and the implementation context of service-learning subjects at the university. The relevant set of questions consists of 14 items measuring students’ self-perceived attainment of the intellectual (five items), social (three items), intrapersonal (three items) and civic (three items) outcomes. All items are rated on a 10-point Likert scale (1: very little; 10: very much).

Students’ perception of their connectedness in learning was measured by a set of questions adapted by the university’s research team with reference to the literature on connectedness in the classroom and community (Bolliger & Inan, 2012; Frieling et al., 2018; Rovai, 2002). It consists of 24 items that intend to measure students’ perception of their connectedness to the teaching team, their peers and the community that consists of the service recipients. All items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1: strongly disagree; 5: strongly agree).

Overall, our findings suggest that connectedness does play an important role in students’ learning outcomes in service-learning. We also find that whom you perceive connectedness to has differential impacts on learning outcomes that are known to be salient in the service-learning literature. Specifically, connectedness to service recipients matters the most overall and has the strongest association with civic-related outcomes, whereas connectedness felt in the classroom and with instructors seems to be only significantly correlated with non-civic-related outcomes. Connectedness to peers, on the other hand, on average is negatively related to learning outcomes but not always statistically significant.
Findings from this study open up a fruitful avenue of research. Service-learning is considered as an effective pedagogy to engage students not only in the classroom but also in society, yet assessing engagement remains a challenge. Connectedness, in a way, measures the “quality” of student engagement. If connectedness indeed matters for learning outcomes, which aspect of it matters for what kind of outcomes and why? How do we enhance these different facets of connectedness? Furthermore, it is a long concern that the physical separation of students may reduce their sense of connectedness (Kerka, 1996), what this means for student outcomes that are traditionally salient in the service-learning literature deserves more attention in the context of e-service-learning, especially since distance learning is an inevitable and growing trend. These are all questions that are worthy of investigation in future studies.