College-wide Learning Goals and eportfolios

The College-wide Learning Goals were adopted during the development of the strategic plan. The goals are integrated across courses, programs, majors and co-curricular activities. The eportfolio process allows a student to demonstrate their skills and knowledge relative to each of those goals. The goals are: 

• Critical, analytical and integrative thinking
• Creative and reflective capacities
• Leadership, collaboration, and teamwork
• Writing and other communication skills
• Global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness

Descriptions

In 2009, a group of faculty and staff developed a set of descriptions for each goal to facilitate understanding and use across the campus.

Critical thinking includes both analytical and integrative components. Critical thinkers demonstrate the ability to accurately identify a problem, question, or issue, and find information relevant to that issue. They analyze assumptions, implications, and conclusions, and support claims with evidence. They make connections between disparate sources of information and integrate other perspectives and positions into their own thinking. They revise their own thinking in response to convincing evidence and argument.

Creative thinking includes a range of practices from across the disciplines: artistic expression, innovation in business, and scientific experimentation would all fall under the heading creativity. Creative thinking includes combining or synthesizing existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the ability to think, react, and work in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking. All of these acts of creativity include acknowledging and pressing beyond current practices in the field and making those activities public.

Teamwork includes both collaboration and leadership. Team members demonstrate a focused effort on the group goal and aims and they take responsibility for their own effort, contributions, and interactions with the rest of the team.

Communication is the ability to convey information in a way that allows the audience to understand the communicator's meaning, deepens their understanding, and when appropriate makes a persuasive case for the communicator’s position. Communication takes place in a wide variety of ways, visual, spoken, and performed as well as written. Written communication is particularly important in an educational context because all disciplines use writing according to the goals, values, and conventions of each discipline. Writing effectively requires addressing multiple aspects of the written work, from the writer’s main objective and how he or she accomplishes it to organization, sentence structure, word choice, and mechanical issues.

Global consciousness is revealed in the ability to understand the global, international, and/or cross-cultural sources and implications of systems, events, ideas, and/or actions. It is revealed in
• Understanding of the existence and impact of power relations (global, national, local, and personal)
• Awareness that a cultural lens shapes one’s understanding of cultures (including one’s own culture) and the world, and that these understandings are partial.
• Skills and knowledge to act effectively and appropriately in settings where language and culture are not native.
• Understanding of domestic diversity issues (privilege, power, societal “isms,” social justice).
• Awareness of the ways that diversity/social justice issues play out globally.

Social responsibility encompasses an understanding of one’s connection to broader communities (local, national, global) and the development of skills and knowledge for effective social action.

Ethical awareness is the willingness and ability to recognize and evaluate (1) moral and ethical contexts and dilemmas; (2) one’s own ethical values; and (3) the implications of one's own behavior for the lives of others.

Rubrics

In 2009-2010 rubrics were developed to assess student work and how it demonstrated the students' skill level on various criteria across a developmental range. These rubrics were refined in 2011 and will be used during the 2011-2012 academic year. Rubrics will be annually reviewed starting in the summer of 2012. The rubrics are found in this PDF.