Analysis of Student Reflections from Civil and Environmental Engineering Capstone Courses to Evaluate Service-Learning Experiences and Their Effectiveness

Student reflections offer an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of service-learning (SL) in engineering courses. This paper explains the approach, analysis, and conclusions of students’ written reflections (n=246) from 62 different team-based SL projects in a combined civil engineering and environmental engineering (CEE) capstone course over five consecutive years. The analysis addressed five broad research questions. The reflections were coded for 10 attributes. Anonymous exit surveys taken by the same set of students supplemented the reflections data in addition to instructors’ assessment of five attributes—the quality of the deliverables, team dynamics, project scope, and community partners’ background and level of project engagement. The analysis showed that the student reflections provided an authentic and reliable set of data to assess student experience. The students’ overall satisfaction with their SL experience was largely independent of their gender, major, residency, prior academic record, and affinity toward service. However, student satisfaction did correlate with the student’s perception of achieving the three tenets of SL—academic enhancement, personal growth, and civic engagement. The study reinforces the effectiveness of SL as a strong teaching and learning approach for capstone CEE courses. Despite challenges such as team dynamics and community partner interactions, this study showed that most students (almost 90%) had a positive overall experience in their SL capstone projects.