Service learning and the medical student affective domain

Background The Association of American Medical College (AAMC) requires all students to demonstrate four core attributes: knowledge, skills, altruism and dutifulness. A formal service‐learning curriculum may serve to explicitly foster altruism and dutifulness in the affective domain of Bloom's taxonomy as well as proactively improve student well‐being. Approach All Harvard Medical School students enrolled in the Principal Clinical Experience (PCE) programme in the 2018–2019 academic year at Brigham and Women's Hospital were excused from clerkship responsibilities and given the opportunity to participate in a half‐day team‐based community‐service intervention at a not‐for‐profit organisation in Boston, MA. Following the service‐learning initiative, we examined student compassion, civic responsibility, well‐being and team cooperativeness using validated survey questions, supplemented by free‐text feedback. Evaluation Forty‐five of the 55 PCE students (82%) attended the outing. Overall, 68% of students found the outing to be valuable and 23% somewhat valuable. On a scale of 0–20, students reported very high self‐perception of compassion (mean = 19.9), civic responsibility (mean = 19.7) and team development and composition (mean = 19.1), after the event. Students reported lower perceptions of personal well‐being (mean = 17.5), but emotional wellness was the most frequently mentioned theme in open response. Implications Incorporation of a team‐based service‐learning activity contributes to the students' community understanding, empathy and class team building. Utilisation of a published framework in the development of this initiative likely contributed to its success. Given our findings, we plan further expansion of this service learning longitudinally through the 4‐year curriculum to potentially strengthen the affective domain for students further.