1.4 Evidence of Efficacy

Community engagement is not a new teaching practice, but a cornerstone of effective community engagement is a responsiveness to the community’s – including students’ – needs. This is why we continue to research student learning outcomes each semester. In research ethics, there are many ways of looking at interventions, or at new ways of doing things and assessing their efficacy. One route is to examine a brand-new strategy and determine if it improves outcomes, with the potential that there may be negative outcomes (for instance, think of a medical treatment that might help cure a specific type of cancer but has anticipated consequences that are negative, like partial hearing loss or long term malaise). Another route is to suggest that if a new strategy does no harm, and has the potential for benefit, it should be practiced (beneficence) to see its efficacy. In your course, your instructor is using community engagement not as a new intervention that’s not been tested or evaluated. Instead, this learning opportunity has been designed based on a long legacy of research that suggests within the right constructs, community engagement can improve your ability to master the learning objectives in this course.

In preliminary research on the community engagement practices at WSU Vancouver, data that suggests students in community-engaged courses were more apt to indicate mastery of learning outcomes of the course. For instance, since 2019 we’ve assessed the impact of community engagement in English 402: Technical and Professional Writing. Each semester, students completed an end-of-semester survey asking them to self-report on their achievement of learning outcomes from the syllabus, with no prompting from the researcher or faculty. This study had a ‘control’ group (students who did not have community engagement in their section) and an intervention group (students who did have community engagement in their section). Students responded on a seven-point Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” in response to statements regarding whether English 402 prepared them to, for instance, compose rhetorically effective documents. As an example of the CE curriculum’s efficacy, we can look at data from one semester: in Fall 2019, the survey had a 73% response rate, with about half of the respondents in a community engaged section, and half in a traditional section. Nearly double the students in community engaged sections strongly agreed that English 402 provided them “strategies for composing rhetorically effective documents.” Additionally, there was a marked increase in respondents from community engaged sections who “strongly agreed” (again, one of seven on a scale) that English 402 helped them successfully collaborate on writing projects (40% of CE intervention compared to 23.26% of control), manage large research project (22.22% of CE interventions compared to 13.95% of control) and recognize ethical issues in technical and professional communication (42.22% of CE intervention compared to 34.88% of control). Marked improvement in CE students’ self-reported competency in planning and drafting, revising, and disseminating written work were also apparent in the pilot study. Moreover, students in the CE sections felt more comfortable evaluating and responding to the writing of others. This is just one example of one course evaluation that exhibits the impact community engagement can have on your ability to achieve learning objectives while supporting your community.

Every semester we conduct an end-of-semester assessment in community engaged courses. Feedback from students and community partners help us understand of the impact of community engagement on student learning and community capacity. We hope when the time comes you’ll be willing to share your experience with community engagement so we can continuously improve the work we do for students and community collaborators.