Learning at CMC - Our Institutional Student Learning Outcomes and Your College Experience

Students will demonstrate various intellectual and practical skills for personal, creative, and professional pursuits by learning about human cultures and the world around us.

Learning experiences are focused on engagement with big questions, both contemporary and enduring, and practiced extensively across the curriculum and co-curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance.

Knowledge Competencies

Inquiry and Analysis

Inquiry is a systematic process of exploring issues, objects or works through the collection and analysis of evidence that results in informed conclusions or judgments. Analysis is the process of breaking complex topics or issues into parts to gain a better understanding of them.

Measured through Dimensions:

• Identify a topic
• Incorporate information & existing research
• Integrate various points of view
• Select or develop a design process
• Analyze and interpret evidence
• Draw conclusions

Critical and Creative Thinking

Critical thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Creative thinking is both the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.

Measured through Dimensions:

• Creative:

1. 1. Demonstrate originality & ingenuity
   2. Take risks
   3. Solve problems
   4. Embrace contradictions
   5. Think innovatively
   6. Connect, synthesize, and transform ideas

• Critical:

1. 1. Explain an issue(s)
   2. Utilize context – relevance of context
   3. Utilize context – identify assumptions
   4. Formulate an argument
   5. Incorporate evidence
   6. Understand implications & make conclusions

Communication - Written and Oral

Oral communication is a prepared, purposeful presentation designed to intentionally listen to others, acknowledge incoming communication, increase a listener’s knowledge, to foster understanding, and/or to promote change in the listeners' attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors. Written communication is the development and expression of ideas in writing. Written communication involves learning to work in many genres and styles. It can involve working with many different writing technologies, and mixing texts, data, and images. Written communication abilities develop through iterative experiences across the curriculum.

Measured through dimensions:

• Oral:

1. 1. Illustrate organization
   2. Develop a central message
   3. Address language
   4. Execute delivery
   5. Integrate content and supporting material

• Written:

1. 1. Employ rhetorical knowledge
   2. Develop content, including visual
   3. Apply genre and disciplinary conventions
   4. Use sources and evidence
   5. Control syntax, mechanics, and visuals

Quantitative Literacy

A competency and comfort in working with numerical data. Individuals with strong Quantitative Literacy skills possess the ability to reason and solve quantitative problems from a wide array of authentic contexts and everyday life situations. They understand and can create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence and they can clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats (using words, tables, graphs, mathematical equations, etc., as appropriate).

Measured through dimensions:

• Interpret information
• Represent information
• Perform calculations
• Apply and analyze information
• Communicate using mathematical forms
• Address assumptions (stats)

Information Literacy

The set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.

Measured through dimensions:

• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information
• Evaluate information critically
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Use information ethically and legally

Teamwork/Collaboration

Teamwork is behaviors under the control of individual team members (effort they put into team tasks, their manner of interacting with others on the team, and the quantity and quality of contributions they make to team discussions).

Measured through dimensions:

• Contribute to team meetings
• Facilitate the contributions of team members
• Contribute individually outside of team meetings
• Foster constructive team climate
• Respond to conflict

Problem Solving

The process of designing, evaluating, and implementing a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.

Measured through dimensions:

• Define a problem
• Propose a strategy
• Evaluate potential strategies
• Apply a strategy
• Evaluate results

Students will develop the knowledge and skills to serve and contribute to the integral social, economic, and environmental well-being of local and global communities in order to enact the college’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Learning experiences will be anchored in active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges.

Involvement Competencies

Civic Knowledge and Engagement—Local and Global

"Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes" (Ed. Ehrlich, 2000). In addition, civic engagement encompasses actions wherein individuals participate in activities of personal and public concern that are both individually life enriching and socially beneficial to the community.

Measured through dimensions:

• Promote diversity of communities and cultures
• Connect and extend civic knowledge
• Relate civic identity to civic values and commitment
• Utilize civic communication
• Lead civic action and reflection
• Collaborate across civic context/structures

Global Learning

Global learning is a critical analysis of and an engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, and political) and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability. Through global learning, students should 1) become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences, 2) seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities, and 3) address the world’s most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

Measured through dimensions:

• Build self-awareness
• Examine perspectives
• Promote diversity
• Share personal and social responsibility
• Understand social, economic, and environmental well-being of local and global systems
• Apply knowledge to contemporary global contexts

Intercultural Knowledge and Competence

"A set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts” (Bennett, J. M., 2008).

Measured through dimensions:

• Espouse cultural self-awareness
• Understand cultural worldview frameworks
• Practice empathy
• Communicate verbally and nonverbally
• Nurture curiosity
• Possess openness attitudes

Ethical Reasoning and Action

Reasoning about right and wrong human conduct. It requires students to be able to assess their own ethical values and the social context of problems, recognize ethical issues in a variety of settings, think about how different ethical perspectives might be applied to ethical dilemmas and consider the ramifications of alternative actions. Students’ ethical self-identity evolves as they practice ethical decision-making skills and learn how to describe and analyze positions on ethical issues.

Measured through dimensions:

• Espouse ethical self-awareness
• Understand different ethical perspectives/concepts
• Recognize ethical issues
• Apply ethical perspectives/concepts
• Evaluate different ethical perspectives/concepts

Students will pose challenging questions, address complex issues, and develop cooperative and creative responses through integrated, multidisciplinary, and innovative experiences.

Learning experiences will be focused on the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new settings and complex problems.

Application Competencies

Synthesis and Advanced Accomplishment Across General and Specialized Studies

Integrative learning is an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond campus.

Measured through dimensions:

• Connect to experience
• Connect to discipline
• Transfer knowledge
• Integrate communication
• Reflect and self-assess

Foundations and Skills for Lifelong Learning

"All purposeful learning activity, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competence.” An endeavor of higher education is to prepare students to be this type of learner by developing specific dispositions and skills described in this rubric while in school. (The European Commission, 2000)

Measured through dimensions:

• Nurture curiosity
• Enact initiative
• Pursue independence
• Transfer knowledge
• Reflect and self-assess

Resources:

AAC&U Value Rubrics

ACRL Framework