Student Learning Outcomes

ODU prepares students for professions and lifelong learning through a comprehensive liberal arts education in the Catholic and Dominican tradition. 

  • This information is also published in the ODU Catalog

Broad and Integrative Knowledge

Students connect different areas of knowledge, and they use their knowledge to address major questions, including the questions of the core seminars:

What does it mean to be human?
What is the common good?
What is justice?
What truths have we learned?

Specialized Knowledge

Students demonstrate an understanding of a specialization or major field of study. Learning outcomes are specific to the major or specialization.

Intellectual Skills

  • Analytic inquiry Students differentiate and evaluate theories and approaches to selected complex problems.
  • Using information resources Students locate, evaluate, use and properly cite multiple information resources across media. Students generate information through inquiry and utilize it in academic work.
  • Engaging diverse perspectives Students present reasoned analyses of issues and demonstrate consideration of competing views.
  • Moral and ethical reasoning Students identify the premises that support different ethical judgments, and they use rational argumentation to defend their ethical judgments.
  • Quantitative reasoning Students understand and employ quantitative analysis to describe and solve problems.
  • Communicating effectively Students develop coherent arguments or narratives for a variety of audiences and purposes via oral, written and visual modes.
  • Imaginative and creative inquiry

Students understand and appreciate the creative expressions of the human condition.

Applied and Collaborative Learning

Students apply knowledge and skills to address problems through scientific inquiry, creative and other methods, both individually and collaboratively.

Civil and Global Learning

Students demonstrate an understanding of the complexities of an interconnected world, and look beyond individual and local interests to identify and evaluate the social, ethical and political responsibilities of global citizenship.

Learning within the Catholic and Dominican Tradition

Students are committed to seeking truth throughout their lives and to serving others. Students articulate the ways that Catholic and Dominican thinkers have answered major questions with a special consideration of God’s self-revelation in Christ and creation.

Approved by the Faculty Senate-February 10, 2016

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