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The General Education Learning Outcomes
Where did they come from? The General Education Learning Outcomes system was originally modeled after Alverno College's system of student evaluation that was developed in the early 1970's. This system established learning outcomes in eight ability areas (each of these has six levels) across the entire college and replaced the traditional method of evaluation - grades. At Alverno, a student receives "validation" from the instructor that she has met a particular learning outcome in that course. A student must accumulate a number of these validations from various course work through the entire 120+ hours necessary to graduate. Thus, an Alverno graduate will have an eight-by-six matrix that has a whole set of validations from all of the eight ability areas from a variety of instructors. Alverno College hosts a bi-yearly one day institute in which they explain their system in greater detail. What are these statements? At HCC, the faculty initially developed learning outcomes in three areas: Communication, Diversity, and Problem-Solving. Statements were written that reflected what faculty thought were important and essential skills for students regardless of the course. For example in the Communication area, if a student writes a paper in English 101, in Psychology 101, or Business 220, then certain elements of writing like producing and supporting a theme statement might be expected in those papers. Thus, faculty across the college produced a whole series of statements in each of the three areas (see History for more details). The initial statements were coded into the syllabi in 1996 and beyond as new courses were added. However, several problems were encountered. First, none of the learning outcomes were leveled. That is, each of the statements exists independently of each other. This can create some misunderstanding as well as overuse of some codes. For example in Communication again, if a student is expected to be able to develop specific and well focused arguments (C3) doesn't this also imply that a clear theme statement also needs to be present (C1)? Should the syllabus list both outcomes? Hence, some refinement of the statements is needed as well as an order. The second problem found was that some statements were used quite a bit while others were cited infrequently or not all. Therefore, a second look at the latter statements might seem necessary. Finally, it was noted that nothing in the outcomes directly addressed critical thinking and virtually every course at our school has some critical thinking component. To begin addressing some of these issues, several steps were initiated by both the old and the new Assessment Committee. First, the original Problem-Solving outcomes were scrapped in favor of five new ones that were placed into levels. A goal was established to revise, reduce, and level the Communication and Diversity outcomes in the near future as well. This will include examination of the infrequently used outcomes cited earlier. Next, a small team of faculty was recruited to produce a set of leveled Critical Thinking outcomes. These statements and their levels were based in part from Bloom's Taxonomy and will make their debut in the Spring 2003 semester. In the Spring 2005 semester, both the Communication and Diversity statements were updated. The Communication Outcomes were reduced from eight statements to six and the Diversity Outcomes were reduced from eight statements to five. The new Diversity Outcomes were also based off of Bloom's affective domain. Links to each of the four sets of statements are:
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