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Your Service Learning Project will be approved or disapproved for Honors credit on the basis of the Evaluation Paper-not by the journal you keep during the project. The journal should help you chart your own personal growth, and your faculty mentor will want to evaluate its quality, but the Honors Advisory Council will not see your journal, and it will not be archived, as the other Honors Projects are. Once your Service Learning Project has been completed and approved for Honors credit, it is your Evaluation Paper that will be bound and housed in the SCC Library. It is, therefore, very important that you follow these instructions for writing and formatting your Service Learning Project Evaluation paper.
The following instructions assume that you have consulted with both your mentor and assigned proofreader for help with formatting and proofreading your Evaluation Paper.
Writing the Evaluation Paper
You should use your Service Learning Project Journal entries to help you compose the Evaluation Paper. The purpose of the Evaluation Paper is to give you an opportunity to reflect on the information you collected in your journal, your experiences during the project, and what you have learned from the entire process-in other words, to analyze and evaluate the entire experience.
Because the Evaluation Paper will be read by someone who is not familiar with your project, you will need to provide a framework around your analysis. To do that, make sure that your paper has these three sections (which you may want to label accordingly): introduction, analysis of the service itself, and conclusion (reactions that evaluate the experience).
Following are items the Honors Advisory Council anticipates will be addressed in each section.
Introduction
Include the following in the introductory section:
- The name and address of the organization you worked for
- The types of work you were assigned to do
- An explanation of your interest in this particular project, including your expectations of the project
- How this project may relate to your major and career goals
Analysis of the Experience
Use your journal entries to help you describe and analyze your service learning project experience in as much detail as you can. Include specific examples you noted in your journal. You may use some of the following suggestions to help you analyze your experience:
- the kinds of activities involved in your service
- the kinds of skills involved
- new skills you learned
- professional contacts you made
- information about “workplace mindsets” you gained
- “wisdom” imparted from those you worked with related to your major or career goals
- how well all of the above met your expectations-were there any surprises?
Conclusion / Evaluation
Summarize your overall evaluation of the Service Learning project, giving specific examples with explanations. Here are some suggestions that may aid you in writing the conclusion:
- How well were your expectations met about the service itself?
- What were your reactions to the volunteer experience–positive and not-so-positive?
- Were there events or tasks that did not work the way you expected?
- What did you learn from these problem situations?
- How would you change these situations if you had the opportunity to do so?
- How well were your expectations met about the entire process of the project and keeping a journal?
- What did you learn from the process?
- How will the project and the process help you in the future?
- What did you discover about yourself-your values, opinions, goals, perspectives, personality?
Formatting the Final Draft
- Provide a title page that includes
- The title of the project
- Your name
- Your mentor’s name
- The semester and year
- Double-space the paper, indenting five spaces for new paragraphs. (Note: to increase the readability of your paper, you may want to include headings for sections.)
- Follow standard manuscript formatting guidelines for setting margins.
- Number all pages at top right or bottom center.
Submitting the Final Evaluation Paper
- Prepare two clean copies.
- Include a one paragraph abstract describing your project
- For copying and binding purposes
- Do NOT staple the pages.
- Make the last page a blank sheet of paper.
- Provide a diskette, USB drive or CD of the Evaluation paper in addition to the two copies. NOTE: We prefer that you provide your work in a Microsoft WORD document format.
Rev 06/09
Rev 10/17
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