Elon University / Today at Elon / Mat Gendle and Amanda Tapler author of an article on student development in the Periclean Scholars program

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

Pericles Project Director and Psychology Professor Mathew Gendle and Pericles Project Associate Director and Public Health Studies Lecturer Amanda Tapler co-authored a peer-reviewed article that appeared in the latest issue of the Journal of Community Commitment and Higher Education.

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

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

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

The full quote for this article is:

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