Service-Learning "Rules" that Encourage or Discourage Long-Term Service: Implications for Practice and Research.

Six students spent a quarter as service-learners in a community They participated 3 hours each week, presenting lessons, interacting with the children, and working beside them in the garden. They were prompt and reliable, engaged, and seemed genuinely committed to helping the children. To facilitate the learning component, they read and discussed scholarly and popular articles about children's gardens. To assure them that their service was meaningful, the articles underscored the importance of nature for children's development and psychological well-being. An outsider looking at these students would think they were all intrinsically motivated and all likely to continue even once the course requirement had been fulfilled. And yet, as much as they enjoyed it and as highly as they rated it as a life experience, in the two years since that quarter, only three of these students ever returned to the garden or volunteered for any other kinds of service activities. Why did some continue and others drop out of this kind of community participation? Two of the most important issues facing educators and community organizations are: how do we motivate young people to be involved in community activities, and how do we develop a long-term commitment once they are involved? For many, the first impulse is to require community service. There are increased calls for mandatory service as a way to recapture Americans' sense of community (see Markus, Howard & King, 1993, for overview). At the University of Utah, more and more faculty now require service in their classes. Many of them hope to change how we educate, but also hope to foster a lifelong commitment to service amongst their students. The description above illustrates an experience common to service-learning educators: many students appear to enjoy and benefit from a service activity, realize the contribution they're making, and seem enthusiastic at the time--but then never volunteer again. How do we account for this apparent discrepancy between these students' expressed satisfaction and enjoyment, and their lack of further service participation? Why is it that some continue but others do not? This article takes a social psychological perspective on how the of a service project might relate to long-term commitment to service. By structure we mean the complex of rules, guidelines, and instructions that influence whether a student undertakes service (e.g., voluntary, required, or punitive), that influence how students locate service opportunities, and that guide students' day to day service activities. The heart of our argument is that faculty and agencies may unwittingly undermine students' long-term interest in service: faculty in the way they assign service opportunities, and leaders at the service setting in how they manage the project. We are very interested in suggesting ways of avoiding such undermining effects. For ethical reasons, we are less interested in strategies for persuading, or otherwise manipulating, students to be more favorable toward service in the absence of undermining structures. Our arguments are based on social psychological research as well as numerous experiences with service-learning (CW has taught service-learning classes for over 10 years; NM has been a service-learning student leader for several years and has supervised service-learning students at a local children's garden for two years). We did not conduct systematic interviews, but did talk to many service-learning students in our class and in others'. We view this article as a way to stimulate research on these issues, rather than as a final statement. Some key findings with implications for increasing long-term interest can be distilled from the psychological literature on choice and control and from the environmental psychology literature on behavior change. First, in general, people prefer autonomy, choice, and control over their goals and over their strategies for achieving those goals; external rewards, whether positive or negative, must be used carefully lest they undermine students' natural interests (some ways of using rewards will be suggested below). …