Learning Matrix

Goals

Learning Outcomes Matrix

What a Student Knows

What a Student Can Do – Goals

What a Student Cares About - Personal Growth and Citizenship – Goals

Individual faculty members are responsible for insuring that students attain appropriate knowledge, values and skills in their classes. Reading , writing, critical thinking, computer skills and ethical values are incorporated in the core classes. Individual faculty members are also responsible for communicating expectations to students via their syllabi and other mechanisms.

We have based our learning goals primarily upon the judgment of our faculty as informed by their professional experience, informal and formal contacts with current criminal justice professionals and surveys of the professional literature. We have also incorporated student and alumni feedback and input from the Criminal Justice Community Advisory Committee. The dispersed patterns of post-baccalaureate activity by our graduates, combined with the lack any uniform industry standard, offers us few choices. There are no discernable trends within the field that might assist us, with the possible exception of the rising interest in terrorism.

Because of the size of our Division and the extreme diversity of our courses and faculty, it is impossible to cite which teaching strategies work best. In general, our students respond to applied, practical approaches to learning, but unlike other departments we lack the resources to build our program primarily around such strategies. As examples, moot court or simulated crime scenes are the sort of approaches to which our students would most enthusiastically respond. Properly conducting a simulated crime scene would require approximately one instructor for every four or five students. We teach sections of 45 students in the fundamentals of investigation. To conduct a scene during a scheduled lab period would require nine instructors and nine separate locations. We have nothing approaching these resources. In addition, many of our courses do not lend themselves to such applied teaching. Faculty members have used a variety of approaches, including field trips, observations, practitioner interviews and guest lecturers to try and bridge this gap.