This website includes some suggestions about how you might profit from these study guides, whether you are an instructor, student, or staff member at one of the City Colleges of Chicago, and whether you are attending the cultural institution as part of a class field trip or for personal enrichment.
You may want to use these study guides to plan a trip to a particular cultural institution or to tour several around the city. These guides suggest questions designed to focus your attention, develop your critical thinking skills, and offer you opportunities to reflect on what you experience at the cultural institution (library, museum, etc.). This will develop your understanding of yourself and the world around you. The questions included in these guides are just a starting point. You should ask yourself other questions about whatever you notice that interests you. If you attend with friends or family, engage them in conversation about what each of you observes. If you are there with classmates and your instructor permits group exploration of the exhibit, discuss what you observe with them. |
Why should I use these resources?
Chicago's cultural institutions are fantastic resources that enable us all to be life-long learners, whether we are currently enrolled in classes or not. Field trips should actively engage students in deep learning, not just passively use up class time.
These study guides are designed to provide students with opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills, especially analysis and synthesis. Students should complete study guides containing questions that will help them achieve the learning outcomes that the instructor set for them, so instructors are welcome to adapt the study guides presented here to best suit the aims of their course and the needs of their students. This Humanities Resource Guide was inspired by the mission of the HWC Department of Humanities & Music and responds to recommendations from the "2007 Gen Ed Humanities Assessment Report"
presented by the Harold Washington College Assessment Committee.
|
Alignment with Student Learning Outcomes
Study guide questions have been written in order to give students learning opportunities that will help them meet a variety of course, departmental, and general education outcomes. Depending on a faculty member’s objectives for the course and desired student learning outcomes, some questions will be better suited to one’s needs than others.
Included below is a list of question or instruction components that are conducive to helping students work toward outcomes on various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy for the cognitive learning domain. Some of these questions or instructions incorporate more than one level of learning and even more than one domain. This list is not designed to suggest that the utility of these questions is limited to the listed domain level, but is rather intended to offer some direction about how one might seek and incorporate questions that will help students pursue a certain outcome.
Included below is a list of question or instruction components that are conducive to helping students work toward outcomes on various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy for the cognitive learning domain. Some of these questions or instructions incorporate more than one level of learning and even more than one domain. This list is not designed to suggest that the utility of these questions is limited to the listed domain level, but is rather intended to offer some direction about how one might seek and incorporate questions that will help students pursue a certain outcome.
Knowledge
Ø Find and identify… Ø List names… Ø Recognize… Ø What type…? Comprehension Ø Demonstrate use of… Ø Describe what you learned… Ø Explain the steps… Application Ø Apply the proper term… Ø Attend…and plan… Ø Employ vocabulary… Ø Locate using the online catalog… Ø Research… Analysis Ø Classify/Categorize… Ø Compare and contrast Ø Detect patterns… Ø Draw conclusions… |
Analysis (cont.)
Ø How can you adapt…? Ø Provide similarities and differences... Ø What aspects…? Ø What associations do you have…? Ø What changes were made…? Ø What details contribute to your understanding…? Synthesis Ø Assemble observations… Ø Develop an argument… Ø Formulate a definition/question… Ø What might the combination suggest…? Evaluation Ø Did you get more out of____ or ____…and why? Ø Recommend a different configuration… Ø Recommend _____ and justify your selection… Ø Suggest _____ and justify your selection… Ø What was your favorite…and why? Ø What was the most confusing…and why? Ø Which ____ best fit…? Which _____ fit least well? |