Our goal is to study how and why young people are engaging in a range of civic acts, including volunteering, belonging to groups, and voting, and what the benefits are of being engaged in those ways. We at CIRCLE care about this, because we know that being civically engaged can be positive for young people. This raises the questions – what are the benefits, and how do the actions really relate to the benefits?

We recently received the following questions related to this about volunteering:

a) Do young people who volunteer have higher academic performance?
We know from research by Davila and Mora, that there is a positive link between community service (either for a course requirement or a strictly voluntary basis) and academic performance. Their findings indicate that civic activities (both curricular and non-curricular) had positive effects on high school academic progress, across racial/ethnic groups. They also find that:

• “Students who participated in school required community service were 22 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than those that did not and were more likely to have improved their Reading, Math, Science, and History scores.”
• “Similarly, students who performed voluntary community service were 19 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than those that did not.”

b)  Do young people who volunteer development and gain job/professional skills as a result?

Research has determined what civic skills are – these skills can be applicable to skills necessary to perform well in a profession. Skills such as communication, critical thinking and planning & organizing skills are examples of this. We know that one way young people gain civic skills is from civic education opportunities. Research by Torney-Purta & Wilkenfeld, has showed that students do indeed gain civic skills from interactive discussion in civic education curriculums.

c) Do young people who volunteer engage in their communities in other ways?

Research by McIntosh & Muñoz suggests that community service among young people was positively related to four or more of five civic outcomes. CIRCLE has looked at this question more in depth this year, and will be coming out with more research in the fall.

These are three very important questions, all of which need additional research specific to non-curricular service/volunteering.

–Surbhi Godsay

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 9:33 am and is filed under CIRCLE Blog, Community Participation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.