Promoting the Development of Civic Responsibility: Infusing Service-Learning Practices in First-Year "Success" Courses

The purpose of this study was to examine whether first-year success courses that conceptually integrated a serving-learning component influenced the development of civic responsibility, operationally defined as charitable and social justice responsibility. We longitudinally assessed 173 students enrolled in 10 first-year success courses, 5 with service-learning components infused into its curricula and 5 without these infused components. Results showed that curricular infusion was effective for spurring developmental gains in chartable responsibility but not for parallel gains in social justice responsibility.