Katarína Kurčíková

Univerzita Mateja Bela v Banskej Bystrici · Department of Social Work

The main objective of the project is enhancing the acquisition of social and civic competencies, fostering knowledge, understanding, and ownership of values and fundamental rights. For this project, the consortia will use the Service Learning model already in place in the universities that are partners in the project, “scale it up” and “test” in cooperation with high schools in 5 countries and advocate for service learning to be part of the secondary school curriculum.

The main scientific goal of this project is empirical and experimental testing of the influence of service learning as an innovative strategy for education on the development of key competencies and civic engagement of university students. In the first phase of the project, we will focus on theoretical and methodological synthesis of current state of knowledge on the influence of service learning on students. We will do a pilot research in which we will verify selected research tools corresponding with our research aim. In the second phase we will use a complex and holistic approach to implement our own quantitative and qualitative research that will help us to verify hypotheses about the influence of service learning on development of key competencies and civic engagement of students not only on the level of their subjective perception and evaluation but also on the level of exact and experimental testing.