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Spanish and Portuguese Studies

Academic Learning Compact

The UF Board of Trustees has mandated that undergraduate degree programs assess their effectiveness, with the goal of providing feedback that will allow for continual improvement of these programs.
The vehicle for these assessments is the Academic Learning Compact (ALC), which specifies the skills that majors are expected to achieve. These skills are called Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs).  The Spanish and Portuguese SLOs are the following?

  1. Knowledge of and ability to interpret cultural correlates, literary production and/or linguistic structure of texts written in Spanish/Portuguese.
  2. Competence in written Spanish/Portuguese, including knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, orthography and appropriate stylistic conventions.
  3. Communicative competence in spoken Spanish/Portuguese, including the ability to understand the spoken language, speak with correct grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, and use appropriate registers.

The ALC process requires departments to assess and report on the skills achieved by each of their majors. To be certified for graduation with a Spanish or Portuguese major, students must fulfill the following requirements:

  1. Satisfy the Florida statutes for the College-Level Academic Skills Requirement.
  2. Complete requirements for the baccalaureate degree, as determined by the faculty.
  3. Satisfactorily complete an assignment in a 4000-level course that includes the written analysis of a text according to its cultural, literary and/or linguistic content (the text analyzed and the analysis will be in Spanish/Portuguese) and an oral presentation and discussion conducted in Spanish/Portuguese.

All Spanish/Portuguese majors will be required to complete the third ISA in one 4000-level course (excluding SPN 4420, SPN 4314, and POR 4420) in order to graduate. Since this ISA must be completed only once, students must choose the course in which they plan to satisfy this requirement and inform the course instructor by the end of the third week of classes. The instructor will incorporate the ISA into the students’ syllabus and grade calculation.

Results of the ISA will be analyzed and used by department faculty to determine how we might change our programs to enhance student performance.