What are the 10 Student Learning Outcomes?
Rustic Pathways’ 10 Student Learning Outcomes are the skills, habits, and perspectives its programs are designed to support and its Student Impact Evaluation is designed to measure. Development of the framework began in 2015, giving program designers, leaders, students, and researchers a shared vocabulary for intentional learning and reflection.
This page defines what Rustic Pathways measures. The Student Impact Evaluation methodology explains how change is measured, and the student outcomes evidence page publishes what the evaluations found.
The 10 Student Learning Outcomes
| Outcome | Definition |
|---|---|
| Openness to New Ideas and Experiences | Eagerness and curiosity to learn from other perspectives and incorporate experience into continued learning and growth. |
| Sense of Wonderment | Recognizing beauty and complexity in the unfamiliar, allowing mystery and awe to inspire thoughtful questions. |
| Shared Humanity | Recognizing every person’s inherent value, respecting difference, and understanding that individual actions can affect others locally and globally. |
| Desire to Positively Impact the Lives of Others | A drive to use one’s abilities responsibly in service of local or global communities and to see how small actions connect with larger goals. |
| Empathy | The ability to consider another person’s perspective and experience before responding or making assumptions. |
| Self-Awareness | The ability to identify values, motivations, passions, strengths, limitations, and reactions, and to reconsider earlier opinions or decisions. |
| Humility | Understanding one’s place, respecting others’ knowledge and abilities, and resisting comparison or the assumption that one’s own approach is best. |
| Grit | Determination to continue through challenge and setbacks in pursuit of a meaningful goal. |
| Independence | The ability to think and act responsibly for oneself, take ownership of choices, and navigate unfamiliar situations with appropriate care. |
| Intercultural Competence | The desire and ability to communicate and behave respectfully within and across cultures, consider different perspectives, and collaborate across difference. |
What does each outcome look like on a program?
Behavioral examples make an abstract construct easier to recognize. They are illustrations, not promises that every student or itinerary will produce the same behavior.
| Outcome | What it can look like |
|---|---|
| Openness to New Ideas and Experiences | Asking questions before judging, trying an unfamiliar approach, or revising an opinion after learning more. |
| Sense of Wonderment | Noticing details in a new environment, expressing curiosity, or connecting an experience with a larger question. |
| Shared Humanity | Recognizing common needs without erasing cultural differences, or considering how a decision may affect other people. |
| Desire to Positively Impact the Lives of Others | Identifying a responsible next action, following through on a group commitment, or reflecting on who benefits from a project. |
| Empathy | Listening for context, describing more than one perspective, or changing a response after considering another person’s experience. |
| Self-Awareness | Naming an emotional response, recognizing a strength or limit, or explaining how personal values shaped a choice. |
| Humility | Listening to local expertise, acknowledging uncertainty, sharing credit, or accepting correction without defensiveness. |
| Grit | Trying a revised approach after difficulty, sustaining appropriate effort, or seeking support rather than abandoning the goal. |
| Independence | Making a considered decision, managing a responsibility, solving an age-appropriate problem, or recognizing when help is needed. |
| Intercultural Competence | Adapting communication to context, observing before acting, asking respectful questions, or collaborating without treating one culture as the default. |
Why these 10 outcomes?
Rustic Pathways began developing the framework in 2015 to turn frequently described student changes into explicit educational aims. The 10 outcomes cover how students approach new experiences, understand themselves, relate to other people and cultures, respond to difficulty, act responsibly, and consider their contribution to the world.
A defined framework serves three purposes:
- Shared language: program designers and leaders can name the kind of learning an activity or reflection is intended to support.
- Intentional design: programs can create age-appropriate opportunities for curiosity, responsibility, cultural learning, and reflection.
- Measurement: repeated outcome-aligned survey items can be compared with a pre-program baseline.
The framework defines intended areas of development. It does not guarantee that every student will grow in every outcome.
How are programs designed around the outcomes?
| Program element | Connection to the outcomes |
|---|---|
| Unfamiliar situations | Create opportunities to practice openness, independence, intercultural competence, and appropriate persistence. |
| Community and cultural engagement | Create opportunities to listen, learn from local knowledge, examine assumptions, and reflect on shared humanity. |
| Group responsibility and challenge | Create opportunities to practice empathy, humility, decision-making, and follow-through. |
| Guided discussion and reflection | Help students interpret experience, name learning, examine reactions, and consider how to apply insights after returning home. |
Program leaders support this process through questions, debriefs, observation, and structured reflection. Experience creates an opportunity for learning; facilitation and reflection help students interpret it.
How are the outcomes measured?
Rustic Pathways’ current SIE description includes student assessments before a program, immediately after it, and 6–9 months later, with in-program reflections and observations providing complementary context. The primary published SIE record, the 2018 Impact Report, documents the pre-program and immediate post-program survey comparison.
Read the documented Student Impact Evaluation methodology and its limitations.
What has the evaluation found?
These figures come from Rustic Pathways’ internal 2018 Impact Report. The report does not identify a person-matched sample or publish statistical tests, confidence intervals, or effect sizes.
97.6% of students experienced growth in at least one learning outcome after participating in a Rustic Pathways program in 2018.
See the complete documented outcome table, limitations, and research citations.
