JMU is nationally recognized for having an outcomes-based general education program, rather than one that is organized around required disciplines or content areas. These outcomes, created and periodically revised by our own faculty, indicate what we intend each student to be able to know, do, and understand after completing the respective requirement—no matter which course option the student completes. In designing the original program curriculum, the faculty grouped logically related outcomes into five areas. Each area is further divided into two or three domains or ways of perceiving knowledge, and each course in a given domain has been designed specifically to fulfill that domain’s outcomes.

After completing a Critical Thinking course, students should be able to:

• Identify the basic components of argument, including premises, supporting evidences, assumptions, conclusions and implications;
• Evaluate claims and sources for clarity, credibility, reliability, accuracy and relevance
• Evaluate arguments for soundness, strength and completeness;
• Demonstrate an intellectual disposition to be fair-minded in considering evidence, arguments and alternative points of view.

After completing a Human Communication course, students should be able to:

• Explain the fundamental processes that significantly influence communication
• Construct messages consistent with the diversity of communication purpose, audience, context, and ethics.
• Respond to messages consistent with the diversity of communication purpose, audience, context, and ethics.
• Utilize information literacy skills expected of ethical communicators.

After completing the Writing course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an awareness of rhetorical knowledge, which may include the ability to analyze and act on understandings of audiences, purposes and contexts in creating and comprehending texts.
• Employ critical thinking, which includes the ability through reading, research and writing, to analyze a situation or text and make thoughtful decisions based on that analysis.
• Employ writing processes.
• Demonstrate an awareness of conventions, the formal and informal guidelines that define what is considered to be correct and appropriate in a variety of texts.
• Compose in multiple environments using traditional and digital communication tools.

Information Literacy:

• Recognize the components of scholarly work and that scholarship can take many forms.
• Demonstrate persistence and employ multiple strategies in research and discovery processes.
• Identify gaps in their own knowledge and formulate appropriate questions for investigations in academic settings.
• Evaluate the quality of information and acknowledge expertise.
• Use information effectively in their own work and make contextually appropriate choices for sharing their scholarship.
• Use information ethically and legally.

After completing a Human Questions and Contexts course, students will be able to:

• Question their own and others’ opinions about and responses to the world.
• Apply the methods of the discipline(s) studied to material from the humanities.
• Identify and evaluate arguments using appropriate concepts and techniques and to formulate logical arguments on the same basis.
• Demonstrate an understanding of broader cultural, historical, or conceptual contexts of particular issues, ideas, objects, or events- past and present.
• Experience appropriate humanities events (such as exhibits, films, performances or public lectures)

After completing a Visual and Performing Arts course, students will be able to:

• Explain how artistic works and culture are interrelated.
• Recognize that the arts are accessible and relevant to their lives.
• Demonstrate disciplinary literacy (vocabulary, concepts, creative processes) in a major art form.
• Produce an informed response to the form, content, and aesthetic qualities of artistic works.
• Experience arts events.
• Acknowledge relationships among the arts.

After completing a Literature course, students will be able to:

• Generate increasingly nuanced questions (interpretations, ideas) about literature and explain why those questions matter.
• Use appropriate vocabulary and tactics to analyze specific literary expressions of culture and the relationship between the reader, the author, and text.
• Define ways that texts serve as arguments and identify rhetorical and formal elements that inform these arguments.
• Recognize appropriate contexts (such as genres, political perspectives, textual juxtapositions) and understand that readers may interpret literature from a variety of perspectives.
• Articulate a variety of examples of the ways in which literature gives us access to the human experience that reveals what differentiates it from, and connects it to, the other disciplines that make up the arc of human learning.

After completing The Natural World, students should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Describe the methods of inquiry that lead to mathematical truth and scientific knowledge and be able to distinguish science from pseudoscience.
• Use theories and models as unifying principles that help us understand natural phenomena and make predictions.
• Recognize the interdependence of applied research, basic research, and technology, and how they affect society.
• Illustrate the interdependence between developments in science, social and ethical issues.
• Use graphical, symbolic, and numerical methods to analyze, organize, and interpret natural phenomena.
• Discriminate between association and causation, and identify the types of evidence used to establish causation.
• Formulate hypotheses, identify relevant variables, and design experiments to test hypotheses.
• Evaluate the credibility, use and misuse of scientific and mathematical information in scientific developments and public-policy issues.

Students completing an American Experience course in American and Global perspectives will be able to identify, conceptualize and evaluate:

• Social and political processes and structures using quantitative and qualitative data.
• Primary sources from diverse perspectives relating to American history, political institutions and society.
• The evolution of intellectual concepts shaping American democratic institutions, including issues involving power, inequity, and justice.
• The complexity and diversity of American politics, society and culture.
• Intentions and consequences of America’s engagement in global affairs.
• How the historical exclusion of various social identities influences political, social, cultural and economic development.

Students completing a Global Experience course in American and Global Perspectives will be able to identify, conceptualize and evaluate:

• Basic global problems.
• Global political, social, cultural, and economic systems that shape societies.
• Issues involved in analyzing societies different from one's own.
• Strategies to achieve diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and access both locally and globally.
• Diverse theoretical models to analyze global problems.
• The value and complexity of global diversity in all its forms.

After completing a Wellness Domain course in the Sociocultural and Wellness Area, students should be able to:

• Understand the dimensions of wellness, the various factors affecting each dimension, and how dimensions are interrelated.
• Understand the relationship between personal behaviors and lifelong health and wellness.
• Assess their own levels of health and wellness and understand how these levels impact their quality of life.
• Identify and implement strategies to improve their wellness.

After completing a Sociocultural Domain course in the Sociocultural and Wellness Area, students should be able to:

• Understand how individual and sociocultural factors interact in the development of beliefs, behaviors, and experiences of oneself and others.
• Discern the extent to which sources of information about the socio-cultural dimension are reputable and unbiased.
• Evaluate the extent to which the approach to, and uses of, psychosocial research are ethical and appropriate.