How Do I Find Academic Student Learning Outcomes?
Student Learning Outcomes identify the knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions students should develop through their curricular and co-curricular experiences at Gustavus. We use these outcomes to assess student learning and to inform pedagogical and curricular changes.
Gustavus faculty, administrators, and staff have developed the following types of outcomes:
Institutional Student Learning Outcomes: The four ISLOs name the outcomes students should achieve through their entire Gustavus experience. These outcomes also include a preamble. The preamble identifies other skills, habits, and dispositions we believe students should develop during their time at Gustavus, all of which are enhanced by attainment of the four regularly assessed ISLOs. The ISLOs are assessed by aggregating assessment and survey data from throughout the College.
General Education Student Learning Outcomes: The four general education SLOs name the outcomes students should achieve through their experiences in general education, particularly in the five area courses. The primary assessment for these outcomes takes place in the Challenge Seminars.
General Education Designation Outcomes: The designation outcomes identify the knowledge and skills students should attain in designation-bearing courses. These outcomes are assessed within courses.
Department and Interdisciplinary Program Outcomes: The department and interdisciplinary program outcomes name the knowledge and skills students should gain within a department. Some of these outcomes identify what students should attain by the end of their program while others focus on what students should learn in particular courses or course levels within a department. Department and program faculty are responsible for assessing these outcomes.
Institutional Student Learning Outcomes
Programmatic General Education Student Learning Outcomes
All General Education Designation Descriptions, Criteria, and Student Learning Outcomes
General Education Designation, Criteria, and SLOs by Designation
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Foundations/Integrations: These courses provide students the opportunity to develop and practice key academic skills, habits, and aptitudes such as critical reading and thinking, process-based writing, reflection on values, and integration.
Living in the World: Living in the World courses are a combination of 100- and 200level courses that expose students to modes of intellectual and creative expression across disciplines, identities, and cultures and build skills essential for living and working in a diverse and complex world.
Liberal Arts Perspectives: Liberal Arts Perspectives courses introduce students to the method(s) of a discipline and to strategies for critical reading in the dominant genre(s) of the discipline. LAP courses also give students opportunities to use their own language to describe and analyze key concepts or course materials, and write to explore ideas, assimilate new knowledge, and reflect on the purpose of their learning (Writing to Learn).
Writing Across the Curriculum: The Gustavus Adolphus College writing requirement promotes writing as a creative and critical process and a lifelong skill that enables learning, reflection, and communication. Good writers can accommodate different purposes, contexts, and audiences. Through its Writing Across the Curriculum Program, Gustavus helps students develop this rhetorical competency, as writers learn to make their cases in the most effective ways possible. In short, WAC enables fuller academic and civic participation.