DePaul is committed to ensuring educational excellence in each of our academic programs. Articulating learning outcomes for each of our academic programs is an important first step in our ongoing assessment and improvement cycle. By having well-defined learning outcomes as a guide, our programs are positioned to implement and assess quality educational experiences. These outcomes are also mapped to institutional learning goals, further strengthening the connection to overall student learning at DePaul University.
Liberal Studies Common Core
Chicago Quarter Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Integrate, in writing, the academic content with student experiences engaging with Chicago.
- Articulate the connection between the course content and DePaul University's mission.
- Use Chicago resources in their coursework.
Focal Point Seminar Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Discuss and analyze work from at least three different fields in their written work for the course.
- Participate actively in advancing the collective intellectual understanding of the course topic through class discussions.
- Distinguish between primary and secondary sources, and assess varying degrees of mediation and interpretation in specific source materials.
- Construct arguments based on evidence and the work and interpretations of other sources.
- Revise papers in response to the instructor’s comments.
- Produce a project with a central argument, in which all parts of the project support the central argument.
Quantitative Reasoning Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Use proportional reasoning and percent change to analyze data in context.
- Make appropriate and effective graphs to communicate and visualize quantitative information.
- Critique graphs and charts in the media.
- Recognize disaggregation as a factor in interpreting data.
- Use and interpret linear and exponential models.
- Make algebraic calculations within a spreadsheet using cell addresses and formulas and use statistical, logical, and financial functions.
- Critically assess the sources, importance and factual accuracy of quantitative information.
- Make effective quantitative analyses in written form with supporting graphs and/or tables.
First Year Writing Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete will be able to:
- Identify and use key rhetorical concepts, including purpose, audience, and context, through analyzing and composing a variety of texts.
- Integrate critical thinking, reading, and writing.
- Reflect on and develop their own writing processes.
- Appropriately apply knowledge of linguistic structures, genre, and citation.
Seminar on Race, Power, and Resistance Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge of the historically contingent nature of constructions of race, racism, and anti-racism. The course will compare at least two different dimensions of people's lived experiences by examining how class, ethnicity, gender, age, language, sexual orientation, religion, and/or ability have shaped racialized experiences and anti-racist resistance.
- Develop, through self-reflection and critical analysis, alternative perspectives on the historical roots of inequality and be able to explain the lasting effects of oppression on marginalized groups.
- Critically analyze multiple sources of information and interpret evidence from a variety of points of views in order to demonstrate knowledge about racism and tools that have been used to combat it. Sources may include relevant databases and other reference work, primary and secondary sources, community knowledge, etc.
- Demonstrate knowledge of racism and anti-racist movements or actions through seminar discussion and course assignments.
- Apply seminar content theoretically or practically to address problems and issues related to racism and its intersection with other features of human experience.
Experiential Learning Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Apply particular concepts from readings, lectures, etc. to an analysis of lived experiences in the settings provided by the course.
- Use the experiences provided by the course to construct and articulate the impact of their experience on their understanding of course content.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the ethics appropriate to his or her experiential placement.
- Synthesize and articulate how the ideas and experiences provided by the course might inform their personal, academic, and/or professional pursuits.
Senior Capstone Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Apply one or more theories or concepts from courses within their major to an analysis of a particular issue relevant to the major.
- Identify an idea, method, or concept from a discipline outside their major field of study and be able to apply it within the context of their major field of study.
- Examine how their previous coursework, including Liberal Studies courses, has contributed to their intellectual development and/or their post-graduation plans.
Learning Domains
Arts and Literature Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Explain, in well-written prose, what a work of art is about and how it was produced
- Articulate and explain the “content” of that work and its methodology of production.
- Comment on the relationship between form and content in a work.
- How does the 14-line sonnet both enable and inhibit its practitioner, for example?
- What are the generic expectations of a particular form?
- How does an artist complicate, enrich, or subvert such expectations?
- Assess the formal aspects of their subject and put those qualities into words, using, when appropriate, specialized vocabulary employed in class and readings.
- Contextualize a work of art.
- Do so with respect to other works of art in terms of defining its place within a broader style or genre.
- Contextualize a work of art in terms of contemporaneous aesthetic, social, or political concerns, discussing how these might shape the work’s reception and how that reception might differ amongst various peoples and historical periods.
Historical Inquiry Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Demonstrate a depth and breadth of historical knowledge of specified content by:
- Explaining historical developments in terms of continuity and change.
- Describing the relevant political, economic, social, and/or cultural contexts of historical events and developments.
- Explaining how people have lived, acted, and thought in one or more particular historical periods.
- Demonstrate historical skills by:
- Analyzing and evaluating primary and secondary sources.
- Differentiating between historical facts and historical interpretations.
- Articulating a historical argument.
- Supporting an interpretation with evidence from primary and secondary sources.
- Demonstrate historical thinking by:
- Articulating how geography and regional differences affect the past.
- Interpreting the complexity and diversity among issues, events, and ideas of the past.
- Distinguishing among multiple perspectives that shape interpretations of the past.
- Using the categories of race, gender, class, ethnicity, region, and religion to analyze historical events and developments.
Math and Computing Learning Outcomes
Math and Computing: Computational Reasoning
Students will be able to:
- Apply computational thinking skills to analyze and design solutions to problems or to express a creative concept.
- Develop, express, trace, and analyze algorithms.
- Apply fundamental concepts of programming in implementing algorithms.
- Create original artifacts using computational tools and techniques.
- Apply computational tools to transform and manipulate data.
- Explain the potential harms and benefits of computing in a number of contexts.
Math and Computing: Statistical Reasoning
Students will be able to:
- Recognize and explain statistically based results from real data (either primary or secondary) and evaluate whether reported conclusions reasonably follow from the study and analysis conducted.
- Use statistical software to produce and interpret graphical displays and statistical summaries.
- Recognize and explain the roles of variability and randomness in interpreting data and drawing conclusions.
- Explain common ethical issues associated with sound statistical practice, including those associated with research design, and their impact on statistical decision-making.
- Measure the strength of association between variables and identify possible effects of confounding or interacting variables on the interpretation of the association.
- Apply basic ideas of statistical inference, including confidence intervals or hypothesis testing, in a variety of settings.
Philosophical Inquiry Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Address, critically think about, and analyze philosophical questions and problems.
- Evaluate philosophical questions, issues and/or problems using informed judgment.
- Analyze and interpret the methods used by philosophers in addressing philosophical questions, issues, and/or problems.
- Engage with philosophical topics and figures in their historical context.
- Confront and interpret primary texts from the philosophical tradition.
- Write an analytic essay treating a philosophical question, issue and/or problem that forwards an identifiable thesis, argument, and conclusion.
Religious Dimensions Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Explain beliefs and practices of one or more religious traditions in their specific social and cultural contexts.
- In courses in which the focus is on one religious tradition, describe the diversity of strands within the tradition and explain with significant depth the modes of interpretation of the world the tradition offers both to adherents and to others.
- Identify religious modes of thinking, acting, and feeling such as: myth and narrative, symbol, ritual, law, doctrine, ethics, religious experience.
- Analyze the impact of religion on personal as well as communal dimensions of human life, including for example the relationship between religion and power, social integration, social transformation, and social justice.
Scientific Inquiry Learning Outcomes
Scientific Inquiry: Science as a Way of Knowing
Students will be able to:
- Demonstrate understanding of the natural science content that is the focus of the course.
- Interpret and create multiple representations of data (e.g. graphical, mathematical, pictorial/diagrammatic, and/or descriptive).
- Use scientific evidence to support or refute predictions made by scientific hypotheses, state the limitations of the scientific method, and identify unsubstantiated claims, such as those based on pseudoscience.
- Describe the process of scientific research, including aspects such as skepticism, ethics, collaboration, diversity of community, disparate impacts, funding, peer review, or the dissemination of results.
- Substantiate the claim that scientific knowledge inherently evolves over time as previous understandings are revised with new evidence and perspectives.
Scientific Inquiry: Lab
Students will be able to:
- Pose meaningful scientific questions and generate testable scientific hypotheses.
- Plan, design and conduct scientific investigations in a collaborative environment using appropriate tools and techniques to gather relevant data in order to test and revise scientific hypotheses.
- Develop and use scientific models (conceptual, physical, and mathematical) to make predictions and develop explanations of natural phenomena.
- Address variability in the data and recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions.
- Communicate scientific procedures, results, and explanations and engage in arguments based on scientific evidence.
Social Cultural and Behavioral Inquiry Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- Analyze and reflect upon arguments about the contemporary world using relevant theory, methods, and/or empirical evidence.
- Analyze interdependent relationships between contemporary society and individuals.