Mat Gendle and Amanda Tapler author article on student development in the Periclean Scholars Program

The director and associate director of Project Pericles at Elon published the report in the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

Director of Project Pericles and Professor of Psychology Mathew Gendle and Associate Director of Project Pericles and Senior Lecturer in Public Health Studies Amanda Tapler have co-authored a peer-reviewed article appearing in the most recent issue of the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education.

In this work, entitled “Utility of the Global Engagement Survey (GES) to quantitatively evaluate a unique undergraduate community-based learning program”, the authors demonstrate the efficacy of the GES as a quantitative evaluation tool for academic programs, and also provide evidence of statistically significant student developmental outcomes in the Periclean Scholars program at Elon.

In this article, Gendle and Tapler also critically review the use of the term “service learning”, and promote the adoption of an alternative term (community-based global learning) that they believe to be more appropriate and less problematic.

The article abstract is as follows: “In this preliminary study, the Global Engagement Survey (GES) was used to assess developmental outcomes in undergraduate students enrolled in a multi-year community-based global learning program. Statistically significant growth was observed on the Civic Efficacy (CE) scale of the GES (p = 0.01). The GES appears to have significant utility in the quantitative assessment of undergraduate community-based global learning programs, even when small sample sizes and pre-test ceiling effects exist.”

The full citation for this article is:

Gendle, M. & Tapler, A. (2022). Utility of the Global Engagement Survey (GES) to quantitatively evaluate a unique undergraduate community-based global learning program. The Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, 14, 29-38.