Learning Aims Prior to 2022

Learning Aims For Students Who Entered Loyola Prior to 2022 - 2023

All history classes require at least 15 pages of graded writing in the form of exams and papers. Various assignments require students to master basic information, analyze a variety of source materials, assess and evaluate arguments, and present their own arguments and/or analysis in clear and concise prose.

Students who have completed any HS 100-level course, “The Making of the Modern World,” should be able to: 

• Understand continuity and change over time by exploring key events and developments in one region of the world over the past several centuries.
• Read a primary source from the past and understand it. 
• Read a secondary source about the past and be able to discern its central tenets.   
• Write essays that are analytical, that incorporate facts, and include structured arguments and counter-arguments. 
• Demonstrate how people in the past saw the world differently. 
• Use the past as a source of reflection on ethical issues.

Students who have completed the HS 300-level courses shall be able to:

• Master in-depth a particular historical subject or time period.
• Comprehend different historical methodologies.
• Conduct advanced-level research including library and web-based sources.
• Create, sustain, and present an argument based on that research in well-written essays.
• Discern appropriate and inappropriate sources and effectively weigh the use of evidence.
• Comprehend that historians can legitimately differ in their interpretations of the past.

History majors and honors students who have completed the HS 400-level courses shall be able to:

• Recognize the varieties of historical analysis and the existence of historiographical precedence;
• Conceptualize and develop an argument based on research and drawing on historiographical precedence;
• Conduct and complete extensive research using both primary and secondary sources with the goal of completing a 15-25 page research paper on a sophisticated topic of each student's choosing;
• Carry on an intellectual debate in a seminar format by referring to a related set of readings, offering critical appraisal of the readings, and reacting to the ideas of their fellow students; and
• Be able to state, in elegant prose, the argument of any article or book assigned to them in a history class.

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