Prepared Graduate Competencies in Reading, Writing, and Communicating

The preschool through twelfth-grade concepts and skills that all students who complete the Colorado education system must master to ensure their success in a postsecondary and workforce setting.

Prepared Graduates:

• Collaborate effectively as group members or leaders who listen actively and respectfully pose thoughtful questions, acknowledge the ideas of others, and contribute ideas to further the group’s attainment of an objective
• Deliver organized and effective oral presentations for diverse audiences and varied purposes
• Use language appropriate for purpose and audience
• Demonstrate skill in inferential and evaluative listening
• Interpret how the structure of written English contributes to the pronunciation and meaning of complex vocabulary
• Demonstrate comprehension of a variety of informational, literary, and persuasive texts
• Evaluate how an author uses words to create mental imagery, suggest mood, and set tone
• Read a wide range of literature (American and world literature) to understand important universal themes and the human experience
• Seek feedback, self-assess, and reflect on personal learning while engaging with increasingly more difficult texts
• Engage in a wide range of nonfiction and real-life reading experiences to solve problems, judge the quality of ideas, or complete daily tasks
• Write with a clear focus, coherent organization, sufficient elaboration, and detail
• Effectively use content-specific language, style, tone, and text structure to compose or adapt writing for different audiences and purposes
• Apply standard English conventions to effectively communicate with written language
• Implement the writing process successfully to plan, revise, and edit written work
• Master the techniques of effective informational, literary, and persuasive writing
• Discriminate and justify a position using traditional lines of rhetorical argument and reasoning
• Articulate the position of self and others using experiential and material logic
• Gather information from a variety of sources; analyze and evaluate the quality and relevance of the source; and use it to answer complex questions
• Use primary, secondary, and tertiary written sources to generate and answer research questions
• Evaluate explicit and implicit viewpoints, values, attitudes, and assumptions concealed in speech, writing, and illustration
• Demonstrate the use of a range of strategies, research techniques, and persistence when engaging with difficult texts or examining complex problems or issues
• Exercise ethical conduct when writing, researching, and documenting sources

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