General Education Learning Outcomes

Essential Skill: Communication

Courses in this area should prepare students for communication in subsequent college courses and in their lives beyond college, the workplace, personal and social spheres, and civic life. They should prepare students to become versatilecommunicators who can respond to a diverse range of situations with appropriate written, oral, visual, or digital texts and performances. At the completion of the Communication component of the General Education curriculum, the student should at least be at the Developing level in all areas. An undergraduate in a related field should reach the Proficiency level by the end of a baccalaureate degree program.

Component Skill / Emerging / Developing / Proficient / Assessment Suggestions
Genre and medium awareness, application, and versatility: Identify and communicate in various genres and mediums (oral, signed, written, and electronic) using strategies appropriate for the rhetorical situations attending to audience, purpose, and context / Students identify and communicate in various genres and mediums / Students communicate in several genres and mediums, demonstrating awareness that different genres and mediums have different limitations and strengths / Students communicate effectively in several genres and mediums, demonstrate awareness of their limitations and strengths, and evaluate the effectiveness of their communications with regard to their appropriateness to the rhetorical situation / Portfolio, presentation, writing assignment, oral presentation, digital assignment.
Note: to assess developing and proficient levels, students’ work should include reflections in which students evaluate their choices and overall performance
Strategies for understanding and evaluating messages: Apply flexible strategies to understand and evaluate messages in terms of the rhetorical situation. / Students use more than one reception strategy and describe the central idea of a message / Students use several reception strategies and demonstrate awareness that different rhetorical situations may require different strategies / Students use a wide range of reception strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies for interpreting messages in different rhetorical situations
Evaluation and production of arguments: Evaluate the authority of sources in their arguments and those of others, distinguish among supported claims, unsupported claims, facts, inferences, and opinions; in arguments, integrate support for claims with sources that are used and cited ethically (using a major citation system such as MLA and APA) / Students understand that sources have associated authority and that claims can be facts, opinions, inferences, and supported or unsupported / Students evaluate a source’s authority and distinguish among facts, opinions, and inferences or among supported and unsupported claims / Students identify and develop claims that are supported by evidence and reasoning; integrate and evaluate the arguments of others into their arguments / Portfolio, presentation, writing assignment, oral presentation, digital assignment

New Mexico Statewide General Education Steering Committee July 2017