Cochise College General Education

Mission

General education at Cochise College creates opportunities for students to build the foundation of knowledge and skills necessary for lifelong success. It helps them enrich their quality of life by encouraging habits of mind that enable them to understand and value the world they live in and to contribute to its well-being.

Values

Through its general education curriculum, Cochise College strives to instill into the learning process a sense of interconnectedness and wholeness. We value learning as an ongoing process. We value effective communication; aesthetic investigation, innovative solutions, and creative self-expression; critical thinking in problem solving; awareness of and respect for diversity; appropriate evaluation and application of information; and technological skills in information management and presentation. We believe these values lead to ethical, responsible social behavior. Our values are reflected in our general education outcomes.

Outcomes

Students fulfill general education requirements at Cochise College by demonstrating competency in the following: communication, creativity, critical thinking, diverse and global perspectives, information literacy, and technology literacy. These outcomes clearly state the expected knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies, and habits of mind that students are expected to have acquired at the college upon completion of a degree.

  • Communication: Students, using writing and speaking skills, individually and collaboratively, discover, organize, and communicate information, ideas, and arguments in a clear and effective manner appropriate to the audience and purpose.
  • Creativity: Students perform one or more of the following: analyze, evaluate, and reflect on aesthetic experiences; propose innovative solutions to technical, scientific, social, or individual problems; produce artifacts of self-expression.
  • Critical Thinking: Students employ logical, analytical, analogical, and reflective reasoning in combination with scientific, mathematical, humanistic, or artistic inquiry to solve problems effectively.
  • Diverse and Global Perspectives: Students demonstrate an understanding of the diversity of human experience and the interdependent roles of historical, cultural, socio-economic, geographic, and ecological influences on this experience.
  • Information Literacy: Students recognize that information is needed, and they use both traditional and modern technologies to effectively locate, evaluate, and apply the needed information.
  • Technology Literacy: Students apply technological skills and processes to effectively acquire, manage, and present information.

Cochise College is committed to continuous improvement of its students’ learning. The learning improvement process provides evidence of how well the college is meeting its objectives, helps identify areas of improvement, and allows improvements to be implemented. This is achieved by investigating current levels of learning, experimenting with ways to improve learning, and using the experimentation results to integrate successful strategies and actions for improving student learning into the college’s curriculum or procedures.