General Education Learning Outcomes

Creative Expression (4): Students will learn artistic processes and evaluate print, visual, and performing arts.

• Students will describe the various artistic skills and processes that contribute to a performance, production or product.
• Students will evaluate aesthetic qualities through analysis and judgment about works of art in a given medium.

Fitness and Wellness (2): Students will develop skills for lifelong physical and mental wellness.

PHED 100 (1)

• Students will understand the benefits of physical activity and active living.
• Students will identify the relationships between nutrition, stress management and physical activity on overall health and well-being.

Activity Courses (1)

• Students will learn the basic knowledge and skills necessary for successful participation in a particular physical activity.
• Students will demonstrate the awareness, knowledge, and behavioral skills necessary to support a lifelong commitment to movement and physical activity.

Interpreting Text (4): Students will learn to analyze text, examining both their constructions and the cultural, social, philosophical, and/or historical contexts from which they stem.

• Students will apply critical frameworks to the study of historical, artistic, literary, and/or cinematic texts.
• Students will analyze and explain how language and genre shape meaning in cultural and political contexts.
• Students will develop arguments by drawing on multiple perspectives and relevant evidence.

Exploring Values and Worldviews (4): Students will learn how beliefs and values inform action and shape how individuals and groups interpret reality and human experience.

• Students will understand and explain how individuals, groups, and communities experience and interpret the world.
• Students will identify and examine the beliefs and values that inform their own decision making.
• Students will draw conclusions that consider multiple perspectives and prioritize relevant evidence.

The Academic Study of Religion (4 credits): Students will engage in critical and empathetic analysis of religious traditions.

• Students will demonstrate religious literacy by locating religious traditions within their historical, cultural, or political contexts.
• Students will critically and empathetically analyze diverse religious texts, practices, histories, ethics, and/or theologies by applying an appropriate method from the academic study of religion.

Quantitative Reasoning (4): Students will develop skills to interpret quantitative information and use it to create and critique logic and data-driven arguments.

• Students will solve problems by interpreting quantitative information in context.
• Students will demonstrate the ability to work with mathematical notation, techniques, tools, and concepts.
• Students will create and critique logical arguments supported by quantitative evidence or symbolic relationships.

Engaging the Natural World (4): Students will learn methods to develop and test theories and understandings of the physical and natural phenomena that shape our world. A lab, field experience, or applied component is required.

• Students will formulate hypotheses or meaningful questions based on their study of the physical and biological world.
• Students will draw logical conclusions from data gathered by experiment, observation, and/or from relevant sources.

Examining Self and Society (4): Students will explore methods and models for understanding human behavior within a variety of cultural, social, or structural contexts, both contemporary and historical.

• Students will analyze the social, political, and economic institutions or systems that shape human behavior.
• Students will draw conclusions about human behavior in relation to social, structural, or group contexts.

Global Engagement (4): Students learn about the factors that shape human experience in transnational, cross-cultural, or non-US contexts. Study away and world language courses with these emphases will also meet this requirement. (on Gen Ed website 04.26.23)

• Students will compare and contrast diverse global and transnational perspectives.
• Students will analyze how culture shapes experience
• Students will examine the historical and structural basis for inequalities related to race, ethnicity, language, religion, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, or gender.

Culminating Experience (1-4): Students will participate in a culminating experience that provides an opportunity to apply what they have learned throughout their time at PLU to a project, activity, or experience defined by their major department. Students will successfully complete one culminating experience course to complete their graduation requirements for general education.

• Students will integrate and apply what they have learned in their general education and major/minor coursework (and co-curricular activities, as appropriate) to a culminating project.
• Students will share their work with members of their scholarly community and in some instances with the public.

Note: these are the general education outcomes for culminating experience courses. Departments and programs will add additional outcomes for discipline-specific skills, practices, and content areas.