General Education Learning Outcomes

Reports

Assessment Cycle Plan (view PDF)
This proposal is a two-semester collaborative process for assessing the General Education Learning Outcomes (GELO). It will take coordination between the GELO committee, the Assessment Council (AC), the Office of Institutional Research (IR), and faculty from across the college. One semester will focus on creating the sampling plan, conducting scoring, and analyzing results. The AC will have primary responsibility for these tasks. The second semester will focus on conducting and analyzing the impact of professional development, with the GELO committee having primary responsibility.

Communication:
Creative Thinking:
Cultural Understanding: Summary | Full Report 
Information Literacy:
Problem Solving:

 What are the outcomes?
We want our students to develop personally and as critical thinkers and global citizens. We believe that the five outcomes listed below comprise some important aspects of how we hope to help our students serve in and lead their communities.

• Communication
  Students will demonstrate skills for effective written and oral communication.
• Creative Thinking
  Students will think, react, and work in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.
• Cultural Understanding
  Students will demonstrate a global perspective, the ability to navigate and thrive within diverse communities and workplaces, and an appreciation for the values of diversity, equity, and sustainability.
• Information Literacy
  Students will know when there is a need for information and be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share that information for the task at hand.
• Problem Solving
  Students will locate and identify information, determine what problem exists, develop solutions, evaluate results, and extend results to new situations.

How do I know what I am supposed to teach?
Teachers don’t have to cover every outcome in every class they teach. Rather, you might identify one outcome to focus on (see a curriculum map for Information Literacy for a sense of how the outcomes are spread across the college). The best way to think about college-wide outcomes is as a common vocabulary for teachers to use so that students can more easily identify the connections in what they are learning in diverse disciplines. A student who hears her chemistry professor and her philosophy professor describing problem-solving, for instance, will have a richer appreciation for what we value as educators, as well as a fuller and more complex appreciation for what problem-solving means and doesn’t mean.

But doesn’t this emphasis on “college-wide learning” water down my course’s content?
No. Rather, if you use some common language to describe what you are trying to teach, you will be setting your students up to remember and apply what they have learned in your class in new settings and in other disciplines.

Isn’t this just one more educational fad? If I ignore it, will it go away?
There’s no doubt that efforts to cross disciplinary boundaries face an uphill climb. An even steeper climb confronts efforts that try to change the way we talk to our students about learning in our disciplines. But we think using a common vocabulary to talk to students offers much promise to teachers--especially the promise that students will find our classes memorable and relevant.

These common outcomes can also help us to name the value of what we do for our community. In a recent survey of employers (PDF), 93% of employers said that a student’s ability to “think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.” Our democracy will be healthier if our citizens are information literate problem-solvers who can communicate well orally and in writing, and who show cultural understanding and think creatively.