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Student Participation in Community Service Activity / Chapter 4



Summary and Conclusions

The NHES:96 data indicate that many students are involved in community service. About half of students in 6th through 12th grade reported they participated in some type of service activity during the 1995-96 school year prior to the time they were interviewed. Overall, 23 percent said they participated once or twice in each of up to three activities that they described, and 26 percent said they participated more regularly in at least one activity. Among those who had participated more regularly, 12 percent participated for more than 30 hours, and 19 percent for more than 10 hours. Generally, almost all (91 percent) of those who had participated in 1995-96 also expected to participate in 1996-97, while about half of those who said they would not participate in 1995-96 also said they expected to participate in 1996-97.

While many students were involved, not all kinds of students were involved equally. Those who were more likely to participate were students who received high grades, females, students for whom English was the primary language they spoke at home, and 11th and 12th graders. By contrast, students who received lower grades, males, and 6th through 10th graders were less likely to participate. The greater the number of types of activities students were involved in (i.e., student government, other school activities, non-school activities, or work for pay), the more likely they were to participate in community service. Students who attended private schools, especially church-related schools, were also more likely to have done community service.

In addition to the student and school characteristics that were related to participation, some family characteristics also were related. Students were more likely to participate if an adult in the household participated in community service and if the highest degree held by a parent was a college degree or higher.

Several variables associated with community service participation in bivariate analyses did not show a relationship once other factors were adjusted for. For instance, the results of a bivariate analysis supported other studies' conclusions that white students are more likely to participate than students from other racial and ethnic groups. However, race/ethnicity as well as household income, number of parents in the household, percent of households in the ZIP code that were owner occupied, and percent of families below the poverty line in the ZIP code did not reach significance in the logistic regression. Rather, the effect of these variables on participation in community service that was noted in the bivariate analyses was accounted for in the multivariate model by other variables such as student's gender, parents' educational achievement, and school policies.

The great majority of students (86 percent) were in schools that in some way encouraged community service, and these policies were related to student participation in community service. The most important factor was whether schools arranged community service; whether schools actually required participation in community service did not have an independent effect. It may be that the measured effect of requiring participation would have been greater if this study had been limited to 12th graders (the group most directly facing the need to participate in order to graduate) and if it had been conducted later in the year (since some students might not yet have acted on the requirement), but the large effect of simply arranging community service is noteworthy in any case. It continued to appear even after performing multivariate analyses to adjust for the effect of other factors known to be related to student participation in community service. Private schools, and especially church-related private schools, differed from public schools in the way they sought to encourage community service; students in private schools were somewhat evenly divided among those in schools that both required and arranged community service and schools that only arranged community service, while public schools students tended to be in schools that only arranged community service.

Many students also reported that their schools incorporated their community service into the curriculum by talking about it in class, by writing about it, or by incorporating it in their grades; the most common of these was talking about it in class. Students who were in schools that both required and arranged community service were more likely to say that their community service had been incorporated into the curriculum than students in schools that only arranged community service; thus, whatever the effect of requiring community service on student participation rates, school policies on requiring community service did have important implications for the curriculum.

Because this survey was cross-sectional rather than following students over time, it does not provide data on the effects of community service. A future topic for research might be to examine whether changes such as improved grades or altered attitudes might differ depending on what methods are used to encourage community service or depending upon what type of service is performed. How effective school sponsored community service activities are in preparing students for the work place is also an important question that needs to be addressed. Another potential topic for future research would be to further examine the relationship between parents as role models and the service activities of their children; for example, if schools encouraged greater participation by parents in school activities, a side effect might be to provide a role model that also results in greater participation in community service by students.



Chapter 3. School Practices to Encourage Participation and LearningPrev Contents NextChapter 5. Survey Methodology and Data Reliability