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Journal of Medical Education

Abstract

Medical education suffered from overemphasis on technology and utilitarianism while leaving the humanistic care of patients untouched. Community service-learning is an educational strategy of learning through experience and self-reflection. Community service-learning emphasizes the balance between service and learning activities, community participation, self-reflection and reciprocity. It aims to meet both community needs and students' learning objectives. Service-learning can help foster civic attitude, social responsibility, communication skills, and respect for diversity. Moreover, it can also enhance teamwork, active learning attitude and skills, leadership ability, emotional growth, contextual learning, and knowledge application. Most important, service-learning can nurture humanity and social awareness. The notion of service-learning is developed from a number of developmental and cognitive theories, such as ”ways of knowing”, intellectual development theory, moral development theory, Kolb's experiential learning、and theories of psychological development. Although service-learning is theoretically sound and can provide a good learning experience to students, the implementation of a service-learning program is very complicated and logistically intensive. How to assess students and evaluate the program is another challenging issue. Students' assessment can be divided into following six categories: understanding and application of knowledge, participation in community work realization of community issues, understanding the community, attitude change, and social citizenship. On the other hand, program evaluation involves the following five components: community participation, orientation and training, meaningful activities, self-reflection and evaluation. Future research should focus on the development of evaluation tools with methodological vigor and applicability.

First Page

143

Last Page

153

DOI

10.6145/jme.201006_14(2).0007

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