Student Learning Outcomes

FRCC Teaches the Key Skills You Need to Thrive

We’ve made it our priority to ensure that as an FRCC student, you will graduate with the key skills you need to succeed in a four-year college, a career and in life. We call these our five educational goals our Student Learning Outcomes.

Learning Content-Specific Concepts is Just the Beginning

To compete in today's rapidly changing world, students must be hard-working, self-directed critical thinkers. This means being comfortable with technology and skilled at problem solving. It requires the ability to analyze and synthesize information. It demands high levels of professionalism and collaboration. And fine-tuned communication skills are essential—allowing you work well in group settings and to communicate clearly and effectively.

We have broken out these critical skills into five essential student learning outcomes (SLOs):

• Critical Thinking. Critical thinking translate into your ability to interpret, analyze, evaluate and infer from your own thinking and that of others. This helps you articulate a well-reasoned and informed argument, opinion or conclusion based on your analysis. 
• Effective Communication. This represents your ability to deliver a well-prepared and purposeful paper or presentation that is drawn from credible information and organized effectively. It also includes your ability to write and express ideas across a variety of genres and styles. Through effective communication skills, you'll be able to deliver written and spoken messages demonstrating understanding of audience and context, including response to verbal and nonverbal feedback. These skills develop over time through layered, interactive and continual processes and experiences across the curriculum.
• Information and Technology Literacy.  Being able to harness the power of information and technology is essential to success today. It requires the understanding of when there is a need for information, and how to reflectively locate, retrieve, organize, analyze, evaluate and apply information across multiple platforms of media to a defined question or problem.
• Professionalism. Professionalism is shown by demonstrating strong work-ethic traits through personal conduct and effective teamwork. 
• Quantitative Reasoning. Strong quantitative literacy skills use mathematical analysis to make connections and draw conclusions, understand and create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence. These skills also represent the ability to clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats (using words, tables, graphs, mathematical equations, etc.). 

How SLOs are Taught in FRCC Classrooms

Assignments and activities in our courses are fine-tuned to help students not only build subject-matter expertise, but to also develop these five life skills. We measure student progress toward these essential skills and shape our curriculum accordingly. What’s more, our instructors attend professional development opportunities and receive support from the SLO Assessment Team to ensure that as students are learning course material, they are also acquiring the skills most important for future success.