Understanding student and faculty attitudes with respect to service learning: Lessons from the Humanitarian Engineering Program

Now entering its second year, the Humanitarian Engineering Program, which is sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, at the Colorado School of Mines is creating curriculum that will support engineering students in developing an understanding of their responsibility for solving humanitarian problems that exist throughout the world. As part of this effort, baseline data has been collected on both the faculty and student attitudes towards service activities using the "Community Service Attitudes Scale" which was developed and validated by Shiarella, McCarthy, and Tucker1. During the fall of 2004, 78 students and 34 faculty responded to this assessment instrument. Student data were collected in the first semester of the Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory course sequence, a required course taken at the start of students' sophomore year before they have the opportunity to participate in the newly revised service learning courses. Faculty completed the attitudes survey during the first faculty meeting of the academic year. This paper describes and compares student and faculty attitudes with respect to service activities prior to the proposed intervention. Attention is given to attitudinal differences between male and female students and among students in different age groups.