Service-Learning Project in a First-Year Seminar: A Social Network Analysis

Understanding the effects of a service-learning component on the classroom culture, socially and academically, brings a novel perspective to designing, executing, and assessing these types of active-learning projects. This paper evaluates the success of a service-learning project from a perspective of social networks by investigating the question: How does a service-learning project affect friendship and academic collaborations in the classroom? We believe that the benefits of service-learning involvement extend beyond helping students' academic success. Especially in a first-year seminar course, building a support system for the incoming student in order to ease the translation to a college setting is beneficial to students and to colleges. Here we use social network analysis tools to analyze relational data where relations are described as friendships or academic collaborations among classmates. Our results show that a group-based service learning project in an introductory level Statistics course has different effects on the evolution of friendship and academic collaboration networks among classmates.