First-Year Writing Student Learning Objectives

English 1301 and 1302 have the following student learning objectives:

College-Level Competency Statement and Texas Tech Student Learning Objectives

Communication:Students graduating from Texas Tech University should be able to develop ideas and express them clearly, considering the effect of the message, fostering understanding, and building the skills needed to communicate effectively.

• Demonstrate the ability to specify audience and purpose and to make appropriate communication choices.
• Demonstrate the ability to apply appropriate form and content in written, visual, and oral communication.
• Demonstrate the ability to apply basic principles of critical thinking, problem solving and technical proficiency in the development and documentation of exposition and arguments

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Objectives

1. Critical Thinking Skills: To include creative thinking, innovating, inquiry, and analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information.
2. Communication Skills: To include effective development, interpretation and expression of ideas through written, oral, and visual communication.
3. Personal Responsibility: To include the ability to connect choices, actions, and consequences to ethical decision making.
4. Teamwork: To include the ability to consider different points of view and to work effectively with other to support a shared purpose or goal.

Course-Specific Writing Goals

Rhetorical Knowledge

• Use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts
• Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts (academic and nonacademic) calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure
• Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences
• Read and compose in several genres, understanding how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers' and writers' practices and purposes
• Identify stakeholders and their standpoints on issues of public concern, and identify, explain, and analyze the values informing those standpoints (ENGL 1302 only)

Inquiry & Research

• Locate and evaluate a variety of primary and secondary research materials
• Summarize, paraphrase, analyze, and synthesize information from a variety of sources in their writing
• Incorporate work created by others in a variety of media (e.g., text, images, sound, video) ethically and effectively for rhetorical purposes
• Apply citation conventions appropriate for genre, purpose, and audience
• Formulate viable research questions, hypotheses, and conclusions

Writing Processes & Craft

• Develop a writing project through multiple drafts
• Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing
• Evaluate the work of others, give useful feedback to others on their writing, and evaluate and incorporate feedback from others in their own writing
• Assess accurately the strengths and weaknesses of their own writing, and develop individual plans for revision and improvement
• Enact revision as substantive change