Goals and Student Learning Outcomes

Goals

1. To develop critical thinking and sound reasoning.
2. To enhance literacy in writing, reading, speaking, and listening.
3. To encourage mathematical organization and skills.
4. To foster respect and understanding of science and scientific inquiry.
5. To provide a historical awareness.
6. To encourage continuing respect for other peoples and cultures.
7. To provide attentiveness to one’s own values and to those of others.
8. To develop a consciousness and appreciation of the arts.
9. To promote lifelong scholarship.

Student Learning Outcomes

As a result of General Education Core courses, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate critical thinking and sound reasoning.
2. Demonstrate logical communication - Students will demonstrate the ability to develop essays with sufficient and logical support.
3. Develop clearly organized essays, designed with readers' needs in mind.
4. Write with clarity and grammatical competence and use conventional punctuation and spelling.
5. Write with a degree of rhetorical sophistication, consistently achieving a clear purpose.
6. Ascertain and seek knowledge through reading.
7. Speak as well-educated, literate professionals.
8. Demonstrate comprehension and professionalism in auditory communication.
9. Interpret mathematical formulas and graph and draw inferences from them.
10. Represent mathematical information symbolically, visually, and numerically.
11. Use arithmetical, algebraic, and geometric methods to solve problems.
12. Check answers to mathematical problems in order to determine reasonableness.
13. Demonstrate literacy in reading, writing, and speaking of scientific topics.
14. Articulate an understanding of the scientific process.
15. Analyze scientific data and evaluate the ethical implications.
16. Demonstrate knowledge of historical facts, themes, and ideas.
17. Effectively communicate historical knowledge and reasoning in writing.
18. Illustrate contacts among societies in terms of interactions, benefits/costs.
19. Perceive any given event from more than one cultural viewpoint.
20. Appreciate their cultural heritage and how that has shaped their attitudes and opinions.
21. Recognize and celebrate cultural diversity.
22. Cultivate an appreciation for diversity and alternative perspectives.
23. Identify ways people in various times and cultures respond to the impulse to create or perform visual art and music.
24. Articulate a coherent ethical framework from which they make decisions.
25. Recognize the importance of accountability, integrity, and willingness to accept responsibility.
26. Analyze the principle elements found in the visual arts and/or the musical arts and recognize/use basic fine art vocabulary (formal structure, media, genres) from the arts studied.
27. Analyze how the principles and elements of the art being studied are organized into a composition.