Wright State Core Learning Outcomes
Effective Fall 2025
On this page:
- First-Year Seminar
- Element A: English
- Element B: Mathematics, Statistics, and Logic
- Element C: Arts and Humanities
- Element D: Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Element E: Natural Sciences
- Additional Core Outcomes
First-Year Seminar
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a first-year seminar can:
- Reflect on responsibilities and set goals to enhance confidence and competence in adjusting to change, confronting challenges, managing stress, and improving well-being.
- Apply relevant skills and access resources to learn and communicate strategically.
- Develop an academic plan to attain academic and professional goals consistent with personal interests.
Element A: English
As a result of their learning experience, students completing an English Core class can:
- Recognize and describe context, audience, purpose, and medium.
- Use appropriate, relevant, and compelling content to explore ideas within the context of a discipline and shape of the written work.
- Fulfill expectations appropriate to a specific discipline and/or writing task for basic organization, content, and presentation.
- Demonstrate consistent use of credible, relevant sources to support ideas that are situated within the discipline and genre of the writing.
- Use individual and collaborative processes within the writing task.
Element B: Mathematics, Statistics, and Logic
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a Mathematics, Statistics, or Logic Core class can:
- Identify the various elements of a mathematical or statistical model.
- Determine the values of specific components of a mathematical/statistical model or relationships among various components.
- Apply a mathematical/statistical model to a real-world problem.
- Interpret and draw conclusions from graphical, tabular, and other numerical or statistical representations of data.
- Summarize and justify analyses of mathematical/statistical models for problems, expressing solutions using an appropriate combination of words, symbols, tables, or graphs.
Element C: Arts and Humanities
As a result of their learning experience, students completing an arts & humanities Core class can:
- Employ principles, terminology, and methods from disciplines in the arts and humanities.
- Analyze, interpret, and/or evaluate primary works that are products of the human imagination and critical thought.
- Reflect on the creative process of products of the human imagination and critical thought.
- Explain relationships among cultural and/or historical contexts.
- Convey concepts and evidence related to humanistic endeavors clearly and effectively.
Element D: Social and Behavioral Sciences
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a social & behavioral Core class can:
- Recall the primary terminology, concepts, and findings of the specific social and behavioral science discipline.
- Expound on the primary theoretical approaches used in the specific social and behavioral science discipline.
- Describe the primary quantitative and qualitative research methods used in the specific social and behavioral science discipline.
- Convey the primary ethical issues raised by the practice and findings of the specific social and behavioral science discipline.
- Explore the range of relevant information sources in the specific social and behavioral science discipline.
Element E: Natural Sciences
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a natural sciences Core class can:
- Recall basic facts, principles, theories, and methods of modern science.
- Explain how scientific principles are formulated, evaluated, and either modified or validated.
- Use current models and theories to describe, explain, or predict natural phenomena.
- Apply scientific methods of inquiry appropriate to the discipline to gather data and draw evidence‐based conclusions.
- Acknowledge that scientific data must be reproducible and have intrinsic variations and limitations.
- Apply foundational knowledge and discipline‐specific concepts to address issues or solve problems.
- Explain how scientific principles are used in understanding the modern world and the impact of science on the contemporary world.
- Gather, comprehend, apply and communicate credible information on scientific topics, evaluate evidence-based scientific arguments in a logical fashion, and distinguish between scientific and nonscientific evidence and explanations.
Additional Core Outcomes
Global Inquiry
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a GI-designated course can:
- Describe the global processes that have shaped historically attested societies and/or contemporary global trends, patterns, and processes and how they relate to specific regions and issues.
- Engage in historical and/or cross-cultural inquiry, analysis, and critiques of historical, social, political, economic, and aesthetic diversity around the globe.
- Integrate comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and multi-cultural worldviews and critical thinking frameworks to analyze crucial global issues.
- Gain the intellectual tools, skills, and knowledge to be engaged and knowledgeable citizens in a rapidly changing world.
Inclusive Excellence
As a result of their learning experience, students completing an IE-designated course can:
- Describe identity as multifaceted and constituting multiple categories of difference such as race, color, language, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic status, and intersectionality as operating by individual and group.
- Describe how cultures (including their own) are shaped by the intersections of a variety of factors such as race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, ethnicity, nationality, and/or other socially constructed categories of difference.
- Recognize the complex elements of cultural biases on a global scale by identifying historic, economic, political, and/or social factors, such as ethnocentrism, colonialism, slavery, democracy, and imperialism.
- Recognize how sociocultural status and access to (or distribution of) resources are informed by cultural practices within historical, social, cultural, and economic systems.
Additionally, students can accomplish at least one of the two outcomes below:
- Articulate the meaning of empathy and its role in strengthening civic responsibilities and reducing the negative impact of societal stereotypes.
- Demonstrate empathy by successfully interpreting intercultural experiences from one’s own and others’ worldview.
History
As a result of their learning experience, students completing a history Core class can:
- Locate a problem and pose questions to guide a particular study that is limited to a focused historical period, specific historical figure, people, ideology, or belief system.
- Recognize how historians study groups or peoples that may not have been included in earlier historical studies to reach new, or revised, interpretations of history.
- Analyze, interpret, and/or evaluate primary historical sources within their historical context.
- Construct an argument that is based on historical evidence in response to a question.
Oral Communications
As a result of their learning experience, students completing an Oral Communications Core class can:
- Develop speeches that are consistent and appropriate for the purpose, context, and audience.
- Present speeches using effective verbal and nonverbal delivery techniques and appropriate presentation aids.
- Critically and constructively evaluate their own and others’ speeches.
- Use appropriate diction (tone, voice, style, formality) for the situation.
- Use professional spoken language while appreciating that other language variations are valid.
