National Evaluation of Learn and Serve America School and Community-Based Programs: Final Report

In 1993, the National and Community Service Trust Act established the Learn and Serve America School and Community-Based Programs to support school and community-based efforts to involve school-aged youth in community service. The program is administered by the Corporation for National Service and funded through grants to states and national organizations, and through them to individual school districts, schools, and community organizations. In 1994-95, the first year of the program, the Corporation awarded approximately $30 million in grants supporting over 2,000 local efforts involving over 750,000 school-aged youth

Costs and Benefits and Service Learning

A growing body of evidence points to school-based service learning as an effective means of achieving a variety of critical school and community goals. But what do we know about the costs of service learning

From the Editors' Desk

A welcome to the Journal from the Co-Editors, Cathy Burack and Alan Melchior, and Assistant Editor Jodi Benenson

From the Editors' Desk

A welcome to the Journal from the Co-Editors, Cathy Burack and Alan Melchior, and Assistant Editor Jodi Benenson. Also includes Journal acknowledgements

Do After-School Robotics Programs Expand the Pipeline into STEM Majors in College?

One result of the growing concerns over the numbers of young people moving into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related careers has been the expansion of formal and informal STEM education programming for pre-college youth, from elementary school through high school. While the number of programs has grown rapidly, there is little research on their long-term impacts on participant education and career trajectories. This paper presents interim findings from a multi-year longitudinal study of three national after-school robotics programs that engage students in designing, building, and competing complex robots with the goal of inspiring long-term interest in STEM. Focusing on the subset of study participants who had enrolled in at least one year of college (approximately 480 students in 2017), this paper examines program impacts on student attitudes towards STEM and STEM careers; participation in STEM-related college courses; intention to major in STEM-related fields; and involvement in STEM-related internships and other activities. Findings include positive, statistically significant impact on multiple measures of STEM engagement in college for program participants

Developing Indicators and Measures of Civic Outcomes for Elementary School Students

Over the past decade, public attention on the importance of the civic development and education of youth has grown. To address these concerns, the East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC) Charter School opened in 1996 with the explicit mission to prepare and engage students grades K through 12 as caring citizens who are capable and motivated to fully participate in our democracy. While content standards and assessments readily exist to articulate the academic and artistic development of students, youth civic development, especially at the elementary level, has been under-conceptualized. What is needed is a more robust, comprehensive developmental framework for citizenship education that begins with younger ages and addresses civic skills and dispositions to the same degree as civic knowledge. The product from this project is a set of tested, reliable measures of civic knowledge, civic thinking skills, civic participation skills and civic dispositions that are referenced to recent efforts to provide frameworks of competencies in civic education. Two sets of instruments were developed using a comprehensive conceptual framework for civic indicators at the elementary level. The measures include a student survey of student civic knowledge, skills and attitudes that relate to dispositions, which is the focus of this report; a set of corresponding grade level observation checklists of student skills and behaviors was also developed. Starting at a young age to foster developmental foundations for civic engagement includes a democratic orientation to others and identification with them as fellow members of a community and body politic. This focus is not only developmentally appropriate but also consistent with the goals of many elementary schools to foster prosocial skills and behaviors. In addition, there is a need for greater attention to age-appropriate, instrument identification and development for elementary aged students to document student civic development by focusing on what they can do, an important and often overlooked facet of K-12 civic education research and practice. Addressing this need will also assist other public elementary schools interested in recapturing their civic mission and in creating a K-12 developmental framework for civic development

Summary Report: National Evaluation of Learn and Serve America

In 1993, the Nalional and Community Service Trust Act (PL. 103-82) established the Learn and Serve America School and Community-Based Programs to support school and Community-Based efforts to involve school-aged youth in community service. The Learn and Serve program is administered by the Corporation for National Service and funded through grants to states and national organizations, and through them to individual school districts, schools, and community organizations. In 1994-95, the first year of the program, the Corporation awarded approximately $30 million in grants supporting over 2,000 local efforts involving over 750,000 school-aged youth

Signals for Lorentz Violation in Post-Newtonian Gravity

The pure-gravity sector of the minimal Standard-Model Extension is studied in the limit of Riemann spacetime. A method is developed to extract the modified Einstein field equations in the limit of small metric fluctuations about the Minkowski vacuum, while allowing for the dynamics of the 20 independent coefficients for Lorentz violation. The linearized effective equations are solved to obtain the post-newtonian metric. The corresponding post-newtonian behavior of a perfect fluid is studied and applied to the gravitating many-body system. Illustrative examples of the methodology are provided using bumblebee models. The implications of the general theoretical results are studied for a variety of existing and proposed gravitational experiments, including lunar and satellite laser ranging, laboratory experiments with gravimeters and torsion pendula, measurements of the spin precession of orbiting gyroscopes, timing studies of signals from binary pulsars, and the classic tests involving the perihelion precession and the time delay of light. For each type of experiment considered, estimates of the attainable sensitivities are provided. Numerous effects of local Lorentz violation can be studied in existing or near-future experiments at sensitivities ranging from parts in 10^4 down to parts in 10^{15}.Comment: 46 pages two-column REVTeX, accepted in Physical Review