Students’ perceptions of the barriers to and benefits from service-learning

Abstract

With the increased use of service-learning (SL) experiences across disciplines, researchers have considered challenges and benefits for various stakeholders to the use of SL as a pedagogical strategy in the classroom. Primarily, the challenges have been framed from the faculty’s perspective, and the benefits measured have been for undergraduate students. We address the gap in the literature by examining student perceptions of both barriers and benefits in a graduate program. Our results indicate that perceptions of benefits and barriers vary by a few student characteristics, but after participating in the SL experience, all students rated both benefits and barriers as less likely. From these results, we offer recommendations to improve SL experiences, especially at the graduate level.