Measuring the Impact of a Business Ethics Course and Community Service Experience on Students’ Values and Opinions

Until now, there has been little research assessingthe impact and extent of business ethics education andservice learning upon students’ values and opinions. This paper studies the influence of these variables byanalyzing 129 junior-level students’ ethical valuesand opinions before and after these experiences. Through the use of the Students’ Values and OpinionsSurvey (SVOS) as a measurement gauge, we foundsignificant support for our hypotheses that a businessethics course and a community service experiencepositively affect students’ values and opinions. Thus, we found desirable improvement in the ethicalvalues and opinions of students after they wereexposed to service learning and business ethicseducation. In addition, we explored the impact ofservice learning by gender and prior communityservice. We did not find a significant difference inthe effect of service learning for men or women, butdid find that prior community service increased thepositive impact for students completing theircommunity service requirement in this study.

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