Civic Engagement

Assessment of Service and Civic Engagement (ASCE) Study

2009 Invitation and Informational Packet

Most colleges and universities endorse, celebrate and recognize the individual and institutional benefits of community service performed by their undergraduates.  Many colleges and universities have already sought or are planning to seek the Carnegie Classification of an Engaged Campus and/or recognition on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Role. Dr. Don Levy, Director of the Siena College Research Institute, and Dr. Mathew Johnson, Director Siena College VISTA Fellows Program, are excited to announce the launch of a national survey of civic engagement and community service in higher education that will assist participating campuses assess the service activities of their students.

The Siena College Research Institute (SRI) under the direction of Dr. Don Levy in collaboration with Dr. Mathew Johnson offers schools the opportunity to measure, explore and understand the community service engaged in by their students as well as the institutional structures that support and facilitate or perhaps impede the development of student civic engagement.

The instrument was developed and tested by Dr. Levy and Dr. Johnson, with support of the Bonner Foundation and The Corporation for National and Community Service: Learn and Serve America Program.

Benchmark Institutions will learn: See charts 

• What percentage of undergraduates engage in community service?
• What forms of community service do students perform?
• How important is service to the students?
• How important do students believe service is to the institution?
• How do students find out about service?
• What structures exist or do not exist that lead to students performing community service?
• Why do students perform service?
• What obstacles prevent students from performing service?
• What percentage of students actually perform meaningful and sustained service? 
• What percentage of students engage in isolated or “one shot” service events?

This on-line, fully customizable, institution specific assessment tool invites 100% of your students to participate, and yields a representative view of your student body involvement in and attitudes toward service. 

The goals of the study are to:

1. Provide an assessment tool for institutions of higher education to assess, on the institutional level, civic engagement activity on the part of students.
2. Generate individual level data that will allow institutions to draw conclusions about student sub-sets, and the student body as a whole, for internal and external descriptive data needs like marketing, accreditation, and strategic planning.
3. Create a national benchmark dataset for comparative analysis of civic engagement in higher education (of students and of institutions).

Deliverables to participants include:

1. Each of the Benchmark Institutions will receive an executive summary of research findings about your institution which includes spreadsheets of frequencies and cross tabulations, and a full set of PowerPoint ready graphics (tables, charts, graphs, etc.) for use in institutional planning and assessment as well as in application to outside funders and other outside entities such as the Carnegie Endowment (Application for Engaged Campus Designation).
2. Benchmark Institutions will receive a unique composite measure, “the percent of the possible” (POP).  An institution’s POP score allows the school to see the degree of their capacity to serve that is helping their community across eight service areas individually and cumulatively.
3. Benchmark Institutions will receive the added benefit of access to comparative data for both aspirants and peer institutions once available.

Participation Details:

All institutions of higher education are invited to participate in the ASCE.   The first step is to contact Dr. Mathew Johnson at mjohnson@siena.edu and set up an individuation analysis.  Costs to participant institutions are as follows: