In my presentation, I explore secondary students’ experiences and attitudes in connection with school-community service. This subject is especially relevant because Hungary introduced school community service in 2011, which has not been studied in Hungary extensively. International research findings reveal that service-learning and community service are an effective pedagogical programme within and outside Europe (Bekkers 2009, Vonk 2011, Dokter 2011, Baltes–Seifert 2010, Zentner 2011). In Hungary, secondary students must spend 50 hours in community service at a public, municipal, non-governmental, or non-profit organisation which has signed an agreement of cooperation with the school. As of 1 January 2016, students can only be awarded the secondary school leaving certificate if they have documentation on fifty hours of community service. Consequently, since 2016, the criteria for graduating from secondary school include a non-academic element.

Looking at the school community service from the educational aspect, it is a new kind of pedagogical method, so it is important to deal with it also from a methodological point of view. In contrast to American service-learning, the Hungarian community service is not part of the curriculum but complements it. The young person can acquire such knowledge during the service which is not possible within the walls of the school, and the students, with the help of the teachers, process their experience gained during the service in a planned way.

According to the studied learning theories, school community service is a form of experiential learning (Dewey 1933, 1938, Kolb-Fry 1974) and community-based learning (Mooney-Edward 2001), in which active learning (Prince 2004), transformative learning (Mezirow 2000), affective learning (Kiely 2005) and the community-service (Furco 1996) are also present. These forms of learning contribute to students' ability to develop (Eyler, Giles & Braxton 1997; Astin, Sax 1998 etc.). Based on this, we assume that students can utilize the lessons learned during their service at school and the lessons learnt at school during their service.

In addition, we assume that during the experiential learning, in all three areas, students perceive capability development, so in the fields of intercultural, social and civic skills (Fényes et al. 2015), and the perception of ability development is positively correlated with more positive attitudes towards service.

We explored the experiences associated with school community service through quantitative methods. To measure the experiences about school community service accurately, we conducted a questionnaire survey among students from 12th grade in secondary schools in East Hungary. In the multi-stage stratified group sampling procedure, based on the data of the Central Statistical Office, we chose counties where the volume of volunteering is high, medium and lower (KSH 2016). In the second stage, we selected the schools to be sampled from the database of the Educational Information System of the Educational Office, where the educational institutions were sorted by counties according to OM identification. The selection of schools was based on a systematic sampling of probabilities from the schools of the counties (all n. schools were included in the sample in proportion to the number of counties). In the third stage the classes were selected, where the graduating class with the highest number was selected. The classes were fully questioned and a total of 637 students completed our paper-based questionnaire. The students completed the questionnaire independently in the presence of the interviewer. To investigate the skills development, we created a composite variable with factor analyse. This allowed us to explore the students’ skills development (dependent variables). Our regression model included gender, students’ place of permanent residence, school type (secondary grammar school or secondary vocational school), (objective and subjective) financial situation, religiosity (individual, social, membership in a small community), and average grades.

In this presentation, we investigated that student perceptions of the development of skills during experiential learning are positively correlated with more positive attitudes towards school community service. We have shown that pupils have reported on capability development after completing the service. Capacity development can be measured by psychological tests and self-declaration by students. In this case we chose the second one, because we wanted to examine primarily the attitude change at group level in our research. In terms of capability development based on self-declaration, labour market and intercultural skills have been organized into separate dimensions (factors). According to our multivariate statistical analysis, those reported the development of labour market skills that have higher cultural capital and more positive attitudes towards service, while those living in counties with high and medium volunteering rates, those who attended vocational school and had more positive attitudes to the service have reported on the development of the intercultural skills. In both cases, it can be stated that positive attitudes towards service increase the chances of developing these skills in the community service. According to our further findings, experiential learning has also taken place during the service. If we compare the results in connection with two indicators of experiential learning we have used we can see that those students had experiential development that had more positive attitudes to service.

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