Learning Goals for a Vassar degree
The three content requirements:
First-Year Writing Seminar Requirement learning goals:
- Identify, summarize, evaluate, and ethically respond to the arguments of others.
- Craft rhetorically significant arguments supported by evidence and reasoning.
- Practice writing as both a mode of thinking and a means of communication that includes planning, drafting, and revising based on feedback from various readers.
Quantitative Analysis Course Requirement learning goals:
- Design, use, and analyze quantitative models (Examples include estimations, approximations, algorithms, formulas, spatial models, computational methods, etc.).
- Use appropriate tools (e.g. computing tools, graphs, spatial tools, maps, statistical tools, etc.) to manipulate a model.
- Interpret quantitative information through, for example, using descriptive statistics, making reasonable estimates and approximations, understanding uncertainty, error and/or messy data, and critiquing the model or other result.
- Document, communicate, justify quantitative information through, for example writing, speaking, graphical analysis, spatial analysis, etc.
Language Proficiency Requirement learning goals:
- Cognitive Processes/Meta Skills
- Understand structural concepts of a different language as well as one’s first language. Demonstrate knowledge of structural concepts of a different language.
- Memorization and reflection on the language and the process of learning a language. Demonstrate understanding of the process of learning a language.
- Understand the connection between language and thought. Can articulate the connection between language and thought.
- Be able to apply methodological approaches to assimilate vocabulary, grammar and linguistics. Understand that language learning is a neurophysiological experience. Can apply methodological approaches to assimilate vocabulary, grammar and linguistics.
- Intercultural Competence
- Be able to identify cultural phenomena associated with the language studied.
- Have a greater understanding of migration and colonialism, including the experience of not being in one’s own linguistic environment, as a way to promote empathy and inclusion.
- Engage with a different culture and a new way of thinking.
- Nurture an appreciation of cultural differences and engaged global citizenship.
- Skills/Practicum
- Be familiar with some historical and social contexts for production and reception of the foreign culture (facts, location on a map).
- Demonstrate proficiency (speaking, and/or reading, writing, and listening) appropriate to the level of instruction and the specific language being assessed.
- Be able to achieve a concrete level of proficiency that is measurable and recognizable beyond Vassar College.
Apply methodologies to interpret cultural phenomena.