Section Four: General Education Learning Goals Across the Curriculum

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Institutional Learning Goals - General Education

At Carroll Community College, the goal of the General Education Program is to provide all students with skills and knowledge necessary to be informed, productive citizens. Each course in the program requires students to integrate skills and knowledge gained from academic and life experiences in a specified assignment.

General Education courses support the following goals and essential skills:

1.     Communicate effectively.

• Written Communication: Constructs a message that aligns with an audience, context, and purpose using appropriate conventions.
• Oral Communication: Delivers a message intentionally tailored to an audience, context, and purpose.
• Creative Expression: Produces a work or performance with intentional design and impact.

2. Think deliberately and originally.

• Critical Thinking: Applies evidence-based reasoning to analyze or solve problems.
• Creative Thinking: Explores novel ideas or approaches to generate solutions or insights.
• Quantitative Reasoning: Uses numerical data to support judgments and conclusions.
• Scientific Reasoning: Applies a systematic process to evaluate evidence and test hypotheses.
• Problem Solving: Selects and implements practical strategies to address challenges.

3. Use information and technology.

• Information Literacy: Integrates verifiable and credible sources with proper attribution.
• Technological Literacy: Uses appropriate digital tools or platforms to complete academic tasks. (Examples: Word, Excel, graphing calculator, educational websites, library databases, artificial intelligence, etc., as instructed in the assignment.)

4. Analyze human experiences.

• Self-Awareness: Demonstrates insight into personal values or experiences and connects them to broader human contexts or perspectives.
• Cultural Comprehension: Interprets cultural practices or phenomena with awareness of personal and societal perspectives.
• Ethical Reasoning: Evaluates ethical dimensions of issues or decisions using multiple viewpoints.
• Global Awareness: Explores historical and contemporary human actions and their global impact.

5. Engage in and reflect on learning experiences.  

• Collaboration: Demonstrates effective teamwork behaviors and contributions with reflection.
• Experiential Reflection: Reflects on in-class or out-of-class experiences with insight and connection to learning.

6. Explore practices for well-being. 

• Career Exploration: Investigates career options and outlines next steps toward professional goals.
• Wellness Literacy: Applies principles of well-being (e.g., financial, emotional, physical) to personal decision-making.