How can we measure the impact of CityLAB projects and community engagement courses on students and faculty?
Project Description:
CityLAB Hamilton is a community engagement program that builds partnerships between student, academic and civic leaders. The program supports innovative projects that benefit and strengthen a collective Hamilton community. Currently, CityLAB projects are incorporated in various courses at McMaster University, Redeemer University and Mohawk College. The aim of this project is to investigate and develop an evaluation framework to assess the impact of community-engaged CityLAB courses that can be replicated across post-secondary institutions and projects of varying scopes. This study will last from September 2021 to April 2022.
Challenge Summary:
Currently, various evaluation frameworks for assessing the impacts of community engagement exist (e.g., surveys, reflections etc.). However, there is no standardized method to evaluate the impact of community-engaged learning on students, instructors, and their community partners. Through this project, we hope to explore and test a feedback tool that can be used across community engagement courses. This study will focus mainly on impact on students and instructors.
Goals:
Identify pros and cons of current tools
Identify gaps that exist in studying impact
Conduct interviews with community-engagement instructors across McMaster University, Redeemer University, Mohawk College
Conduct a literature review of existing methods to gauge student feedback Developing and testing a feedback tool across one or two CityLAB community engagement courses in the Winter 2022 semester.
Deliverables: Interviews, feedback tool, report
Where the work will go and what it will be used for:
The findings of this research project will be submitted to a pedagogical research journal. This research project will set the stage for future research opportunities for refining a standardized feedback tool to study the impact of community engagement on students, instructors and community partners.
Faculty: Katie Moisse, Dave Heidebrecht, McMaster University
Students: Adina Silver, Ananya Yadav, Darshana Seeburruth