General Education Goals: Communicating Effectively

The general education program prepares students to employ modes of communication that can help communities reach both authentic consensus and respectful disagreement.  In a two-way interaction, communicating effectively leads to discovery and productive changes in the sender, who may be a writer, speaker, dancer, musician, visual artist, or actor, as well as in the receiver, who may be listening, reading, or watching. As both senders and receivers, successful communicators interact effectively with people of both similar and different experiences and values. They adapt their communication skills with increasing fluency and sophistication to new and increasingly complex situations.Communicating effectively requires sophisticated reading skills in conjunction with a high level of quantitative, technological, and information literacy. 

Learning Outcomes

Students will

IIA. Articulate and comprehend effectively, using verbal or non-verbal
communication suitable to topic, purpose, and audience;
 IIB. Use writing effectively to discover and develop ideas and to articulate
positions in contexts of increasing complexity;
 IIC. Make rhetorical decisions appropriate to topic, purpose, and audience
while correctly using the conventions of standard written English;
 IID. Determine the scope of information needed in specific research contexts
and successfully identify, locate, evaluate, use, and communicate
information from various media;
 IIE.

Read actively and analytically at the college level and synthesize and
apply information and ideas from their reading across disciplines; 

IIF. Know, apply, and communicate college-level quantitative concepts and
methods;
IIG. Select and use hardware, software applications, databases, and other
technologies effectively for both inquiry and communication.