Where it has run
With the Community Service Scholars at DePaul University, where I coordinate the programme. The students in that cohort built this with me. The questions changed in response to what they could answer.
46students finished it
2records reviewed
2records sent
2programmes
Counted from the records themselves on 15 October 2026, excluding test rows and duplicates. Reviewed, sent and finished are separate numbers because they are separate events.
What it showed
- Students who had run a shift of thirty volunteers described it as "helping out". The record is what put the other words in front of them.
- Some capabilities come through clearly in a student’s own writing. Others the instrument barely reaches, which is a finding about the questions rather than about the students.
- A practitioner reading a draft against the evidence changes it often enough that the review is not a formality.
What it has not shown
- No reliability statistic. Agreement between raters has been measured on too few records, by too few people, to publish as a figure.
- No employment outcome. Nobody has followed these students into a job market and this work does not claim to have.
- No comparison against another instrument on the same students.
Why those gaps are on this page.A programme deciding whether to run this needs to know what it is buying into. Three unknowns stated plainly are worth more than a number that does not survive a question.
Where it has been presented
As a poster, "From Service to Syntax", at the IARSLCE conference in New Orleans in October 2026. That is the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement.
What happens next
More cohorts, so agreement between raters can be measured on enough records to mean something. A programme that wants to be one of them can say so.