Overview

Service learning has significant promise. The most rigorous and recent findings come from a 3,800-student longitudinal study in the Chicago public schools, which finds that service learning increases students’ commitments to civic participation by almost half of a standard deviation (Kahne & Sporte, forthcoming).

Other research suggests that participation in high-quality service learning can result in “improved attendance, increased test scores, greater problem-solving skills, and better acquisition of skills and knowledge related to reading/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies” (Billig, 2006, p. 25). Service learning has been demonstrated to help reduce achievement gaps for low-income students (Scales, 2005). The National Research Council (2004) suggests the use of service-learning as an important high-school engagement strategy.

However, most studies have found great variation in the quality of service learning experiences, ranging from excellent to counter-productive. Youniss and Yates (1997) demonstrate that high-quality service can have a profound effect on the lives of young people of all classes and backgrounds. However, one of the major problems facing schools seeking to implement service learning is the lack of well developed curricula and tools to facilitate effective service learning, particularly instructional components.

High-quality service learning only exists in as few as one-third of all school-based service learning programs. Out of 210 programs funded by Learn & Serve America, a federal program, that were randomly selected for a 1999 evaluation, only seventeen met the criteria for being fully implemented, even though the rest would certainly call themselves service-learning and had won grants in a competitive process. Fully implemented programs were those that combined academic research or reflection with real community work (Center for Human Resources, 1999).

This is a critical problem. Despite the general growth of service learning, there is no suitable technology to promote high quality service learning in schools that leads to both strong civic and academic outcomes. To address this need, we have developed Youth Map, an innovative social networking tool to facilitate service learning so that its benefits can become more widely available and developed systematically in U.S. schools.