Experiential Learning in Diverse Criminal Justice Contexts: Issues for Assessment

Criminal justice undergraduates have a wide variety of options for experiential learning at Georgia Southern University, including participating in a hands-on internship, service-learning project, and courses that take place in local prisons alongside incarcerated students (i.e. The Inside-Out Program). The Inside-Out program brings college students and incarcerated men and women together to learn in a seminar format. Classes are typically kept small, with approximately 15 university students and 15 inmate students in each class. While some traditional means of assessment can be used to evaluate students’ learning outcomes, several barriers exist regarding the assessment of courses that involve both traditional and non-traditional students. In particular, the historical exploitation of incarcerated populations in university research and power relations inherent in correctional contexts are a challenge to traditional assessment. Our goal is to establish how best to assess learning outcomes in diverse experimental learning contexts like the Inside-Out program. Several methods of assessment will be discussed, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method will be explored.