Volunteering by higher education students in the UK has a long history which remains largely unexplored despite recent research and policy attention. This article offers a brief overview of the development of student volunteering before the 1960s and then discusses a shift from student social service to Student Community Action in the late 1960s…

Lifelong learning, where individuals keep modifying, renewing and updating their existing skills and competencies, is an essential requirement in the knowledge economy. Yet research has shown that employers often find it hard to hire individuals who are equipped with sufficiently rounded competencies in areas such as commitment, enthusiasm and…

This article considers the role of university staff and students in camps for the unemployed in interwar Britain. These ventures can be seen as showing continuities both with nineteenth-century social service initiatives like the educational settlements, but also with contemporary concerns with service learning. The article explores three camping…

The "Revised Learning Process Questionnaire" has been part of the development of a conceptual understanding of how students learn and what motivates them to engage in particular tasks. We obtained responses from 329 student volunteers at a mid-sized public university in the southeast USA. We first investigated whether the psychometric…

Twenty-one convenience sample student volunteers aged between 14-15 years worked in pairs (and one group of three) with two randomly allocated high quality conceptual (molecular level) and operational (mimicking wet labs) simulations. The volunteers were told they had five minutes to play, repeat, review, restart or stop the simulation, which in…

The Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) for Foreign Missions was founded in 1886 at a Conference in the Mt. Hermon University, an organization designed to recruit college and university students in the United States and later of course through the Western world, for missionary service abroad. The primary leader of the SVM was A. T. Pierson, a major…

How do internships and work experience, such as volunteering, give students a taste of the environment in which they hope to be employed? How do they provide pathways between educational institutions and the workplace? This paper reports on a qualitative research study about the initial professional learning experiences of individuals newly…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the current state of student volunteering in English universities, and show how it contributes to some of the core activities of higher education, including teaching and learning, employability, and public engagement. The paper goes on to describe challenges currently faced by student volunteering,…

The authors report an evaluation of the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the Volunteer Functions Inventory on a sample of university student volunteers. Reliabilities were high for four out of the six scales of the Inventory (Values, Career, Social, and Understanding) in terms of internal consistency. Items in these four scales also…

This investigation serves as one of the first empirical analyses to examine the international volunteering gap year from an educational perspective, concluding an in-depth case study of a prominent gap year organisation in the UK. Contrary to widespread industry promotion of international development, the findings suggest that the experience can…

The Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale was developed by Agbuga and Xiang (2008) by including selected items from the scales of Duda and Nicholls (1992), Elliot (1999), and Elliot and Church (1997) and adapting them into Turkish. The scale consists of 18 items, and students rated each item on a 7-point Likert scale. To ascertain the validity and…

This paper presents a study of 428 youths who participated in service-learning projects in developing countries in South-East Asia, China and India. Using mixed-method approach, this study examined the reasons for their participation in the YEP (youth expedition projects) and the impact of their service-learning experiences on their civic…

Volunteering in English higher education has come under political scrutiny recently, with strong cross-party support for schemes to promote undergraduate volunteering in particular. Recent targeted initiatives and proposals have sought to strengthen both the role of volunteering in higher education and synergies between higher education and…

The survey analysis of college student volunteers from Hebei participating in the Western China Program in 2003 indicated that the volunteers were primarily motivated by the desire to serve the country and to temper themselves. Ninety-eight percent stated that they were confident regarding the coming year or two of service, and most of them…

Between March 2007 and February 2009, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded a Learners Journeys project at the University of Hertfordshire. This was part of their second phase of investment in research into the Learners' Experiences through their E-Learning Programme and was known as LXP2. STROLL (STudent Reflections On Lifelong…