General Education Requirements
Barton’s General Education program prepares students for success as individuals, professionals, and citizens by developing the essential skills and foundational knowledge that make lifelong learning possible. Courses in a variety of academic disciplines challenge students to think critically about themselves, society, and the world from multiple viewpoints and to communicate those thoughts effectively to others.
Essential Skills
Four key learning outcomes form the foundation of the General Education curriculum:
- Oral Communication: Students will be able to organize ideas logically and express them clearly through speech.
- Written Communication: Students will be able to organize ideas logically and express them clearly in writing.
- Information Literacy: Students will be able to identify, collect, evaluate, apply, and document information from a variety of sources.
- Quantitative Literacy: Students will be able to calculate, analyze, apply, and communicate numerical data.
Areas of Inquiry
Courses in a variety of fields provide opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate their mastery of those Essential Skills. They are organized into thirteen categories:
- Applying Perspectives: Students will draw upon the skills and knowledge that they have acquired while completing their General Education requirements in order to develop and address open-ended research questions.
- College Writing: Students will develop the fundamental writing skills necessary for success in college and beyond.
- Creative Expression: Students will express themselves in a variety of modes and media.
- Discipline-Specific Communication: Students will demonstrate effective written and/or oral communication within the context of their academic majors.
- Discipline-Specific Research: Students will develop research skills within the context of their academic majors.
- Historical Contexts: Students will study how phenomena change over time and how the past impacts the present.
- Human Behavior: Students will explain the causes and consequences of human actions and activities.
- Making Connections: Students will build connections with one another, with campus resources, with their prospective careers, and with the rest of the General Education curriculum.
- Numerical Reasoning: Students will increase their competency and comfort when working with numerical data.
- Scientific Investigation: Students will make observations and conduct experiments in order to objectively investigate the natural world.
- Social Dynamics: Students will examine broad frameworks for understanding the relationships between individuals and society.
- Social Systems: Students will examine the institutions and structures that organize modern society and shape human interactions.
- Textual Analysis: Students will interpret, analyze, and respond to the written words of others.