Student Learning Outcomes

Sociology/Criminology Students Will:

  • Program graduates demonstrate proficiency in written communication skills that includes organization, clarity in the articulation of ideas using appropriate evidence, mechanics, and audience awareness.  Effective written communication in this program focuses on writing a clear, testable research question, evaluating relevant scholarly literature, collecting data, analyzing data, and articulating an evaluation of the evidence in response to the research question
  • Program graduates will demonstrate competence in creating and interpreting inferential statistics (oneway ANOVA, bivariate and multiple regression) using SPSS.  Analysis of quantitative data is a key component of sociological analysis
  • Program graduates will be able to identify social structures and agency within sociological theories. These are core skills that sociology majors must develop in order to analyze social issues, develop testable hypotheses regarding human behavior in social settings and see potential issues in the formation of social policy

Anthropology Students Will:

  • Anthropology majors will understand anthropology as a field of cultural study that utilizes qualitative research methods, ethnographic interviewing, participant observation and anthropological theoretical analysis to analyze and understand the cultural lifeways of contemporary peoples, including cross-cultural communication and interaction

  • The ability to conduct ethnographic research is an essential skill for an anthropology major. All knowledge of culture is gathered and analyzed using ethnographic research methods. Students will demonstrate successful construction of quality ethnographic questions

  • Anthropology students will understand the origins of the modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) and how it derives from our genetic ancestry with primate species, such as chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. We will use contemporary instructional methods and current research on human prehistory and the hominin lineage to teach students to understand the current state of knowledge in physical anthropology regarding the origins of modern humans

  • Anthropology students within the archaeology concentration will employ a process of excavation, artifact identification, and analytical deduction, to study the culture and lifeways of past peoples based on the evidence of their material culture and physical remains from an archaeological site. Students may engage the steps individually as part of an excavation team as a portion of their field experience in Archaeology, or they may carry out the process, individually through class projects or on their own, through comprehensive research projects

  • Anthropology students with the archaeology option will obtain practical experience on archeological or historic preservation research projects. The will be able to apply skills learned in the field school and laboratory courses to a workplace setting

  • Students within the archaeology option will obtain practical experience on archaeological or historic preservation research projects