Developing management students' twenty-first century skills through a service-learning project.

Scholars of management education have shown that it is increasingly important for students to develop practiced and applied knowledge, teamwork skills, and civic engagement in addition to core curriculum knowledge in order to be prepared for the demands of the 21st century workforce. We propose that service-learning, or learning through an applied community service project, can uniquely address these essential 21st century skills. Thus, in this paper, we outline a specific service-learning project geared towards improving these skill-sets. Then, we design an experiment to test the efficacy of this project in increasing these skills by comparing students who completed this project to those in a control condition. Results support study hypotheses that service- learning increases teamwork and civic engagement, and partially support the hypothesis that it increases practiced and applied knowledge. Additionally, students showed significant improvement in their core-curriculum knowledge after completing the service- learning project, and they scored better than the control condition. Thus, this study supports the overall assertion that service-learning can be used to successfully teach students 21st century skills and similar service-learning projects may be integrated into business school curriculums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]