Celebration and Assessment

Making sure students demonstrate their learning to partners and follow through on their promises is an important part of wrapping up a community partnership. Faculty should coordinate the hand-off of project deliverables. Students can be invited to participate in this process, but faculty should oversee it to help prevent confusion and disappointment among community partners.

When handing off project deliverables, you should consider:

• Whether the community partner can access materials freely and openly. This is especially important if students used paid software or university-owned systems to complete the project.
  
  
• How and when the community partner should contact you if they have follow-up questions. Students only spend a short time on campus; it’s important to make sure the community partner has a reliable, long-term contact if questions arise.
  
  
• Whether the community partner needs help maintaining or updating a deliverable. For example, if students created a web-page, community partners might need instructions for how to update content.
  
  
• How you can support the community partner after the project’s completion. Sharing information about additional campus and community resources is one way you can support community partners beyond your course.

It is important to take some time at the end of the semester share the results of community engagement with community partners, students, and campus stakeholders. Celebration and recognition help students and partners see and feel the value of their contributions. Celebration takes many forms, and it can be simple or orchestrated. Examples include:

• Having students hand write thank you notes to community partners
• Inviting community partners to attend and comment on student presentations at the end of the semester
• Holding an informal, end-of-semester gathering for students, community partners, and campus and community stakeholders
• Posting a short article or story about the collaboration on your department’s website or social media (with the community partner’s permission)
• Offering small tokens of appreciation or gift cards to community partners

It's good practice to invite community partners to help plan end-of-semester celebrations. While some partners will choose to not participate, others will want to be part of the planning process.

Assessment helps you understand and measure students’ experiences and understanding of course concepts, so you can refine your teaching methods and learning objectives.

Assessing student learning 
Assessment should focus on how students are connecting service to course objectives rather than the service activity itself. Student learning and hours served don’t always correlate, so assignments need to provide evidence of how students’ service experiences are impacting their attitudes, values, and skills.

Formative assessments might include in-class reflections, peer evaluations, group discussions, observations, and one-on-one meetings. Summative assessments might include journal entries, written assignments, presentations, creative projects, or portfolios. No matter which types of assessment you use, you should:

• Align assessments with learning objectives. Well-designed assessments should give an indication of the standards of students’ expected performance associated with each learning objective.
  
  
• Use a rubric and share it with students. Rubrics are an easy way to communicate expectations and provide a clear path for measuring student achievement.
  
  
• Offer clear instructions and feedback. Students must be able to understand both your instructions and feedback, and both should align with the course learning objective being assessed.

Community partners’ role
As co-educators, community partners and faculty enter partnerships with the intention of contributing equally to students’ learning. Therefore, faculty should invite community partners to help determine student success measures and what types of assessment are most appropriate. Faculty might also ask community partners to fill out brief student evaluation forms.

Resources

• CITL Guide on Assessing Student Learning
• Association of American Colleges and Universities Civic Engagement Rubric
• Campus Compact Assessment of Students' Civic Learning and Development Knowledge Hub
• The Service-Learning Quality Assessment Tool (SLQAT)
• Purdue University Service Learning Assessment Toolkit

Evaluating community partnerships ensures that campus is working toward building equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships. Evaluating partnerships also helps you document the impact of your collaboration, helping you communicate the value of community engagement to a variety of audiences both on and off campus. There are many different ways to measure the effectiveness of a service learning class, and your evaluation approach will likely depend on the course, community partnership, and your own intended goals and objectives.

Post Surveys
Many instructors rely on surveys and evaluation forms to quickly and effectively collect qualitative and quantitative data from community organizations. There are many survey platforms to choose from, including Qualtrics, Webtools, and GoogleForms. Keep in mind that community partners experience survey fatigue, and you likely won’t receive a response from every partner. Moreover, surveys are impersonal and don’t allow you to ask follow-up questions.  

Focus Groups
Focus groups might be a good fit if you are partnering with multiple organizations. A guided conversation with a small group of participants, a focus group lets community partners build on each other’s responses and reflect on their shared experiences. Generally, focus groups last one hour and include four or five participants plus a facilitator. Focus groups can be unpredictable, but they do allow you to introduce new questions and lines of conversation based on participants’ answers.

Informal Interviews
Some instructors use one-on-one interviews to discuss and assess community partners’ experiences in-depth. Generally, these interviews last thirty minutes to one hour and can help you identify what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve future collaborations to better serve partners’ needs.

Personal Reflection
Take time to consider your own experiences as an instructor and how this community partnership will shape your teaching in the future. Reflect on lessons learned when you’re ready to plan your next class. Ask yourself:

• What surprised or challenged you throughout the semester?
• What personal biases or assumptions did the collaboration reveal?
• What tensions or differences of power did you observe during the partnership? How can you educate yourself to address these imbalances?
• How will you approach teaching differently because of this experience.

Resources

• Guiding questions for evaluating community partnerships
• Documenting the Impact of the Public Humanities in Higher Education: A Toolkit
• Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES III) for Partnership Assessment

• Jennifer James and Kimberly Logan, “Documenting the Community Impact of Service Learning Coursework: Theoretical and Practical Considerations,” Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, vol. 7, no. 2. (2016): 17-36.
• Leda Cooks and Erica Scharrer, “Assessing Learning in Community Service Learning: A Social Approach,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, vol. 13, no. (2006):44-55. 
• Sherril B. Gelmon, Barbara A. Holland, and Amy Spring, Assessing service-learning and civic engagement: Principles and techniques, Stylus Publishing, 2018.
• Amy Driscoll, Barbara Holland, Sherril Gelmon, Seanna Kerrigan, An Assessment Model for Service-learning: Comprehensive Case Studies of Impact on Faculty, Students, Community, and Institution, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, vol. 3, no. 1 (1996): 66–71.
• Brent J. Goertzen, Justin Greenleaf, and Danielle Dougherty, “Exploring the Community Impact of Service-Learning Project Teams,” Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, vol. 7, no. 2 (2016): 37-50.
• Kate Agnelli, “An Annotated Review of Scholarship: Measuring the Impact of Community-University Partnership,” VCU Scholars Compass, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015.