FGCUScholars: Think ~ Discover ~ Write advances the skills of writing, critical thinking, and information literacy within majors and thus creates a culture of inquiry that begins in the first year with Composition and concludes in the senior year with the Capstone course.
FGCUScholars: Think ~ Discover ~ Write
Florida Gulf Coast University’s Quality Enhancement Plan, FGCUScholars: Think ~ Discover ~ Write, strengthens undergraduate student learning by assisting students in developing stronger writing, critical thinking, and information literacy skills within their majors, ultimately leading to stronger senior capstone projects. What we have discovered, through learning outcome assessments conducted over the last several years at FGCU and feedback from employers and post-baccalaureate programs, is that while students may be proficient in their disciplinary or content knowledge at the end of their studies, they continue to need improvement in the ability to express that knowledge in a scholarly way. To meet these ends, we will implement and then evaluate our Program Objectives:
- Program Objective 1: Integration of the QEP vertically (across all four years) and horizontally (in multiple General Education courses and multiple courses in the majors) as it builds towards the capstone experience;
- Program Objective 2: Identification, refinement, or creation of coursework within each major, such as gateway courses and research methods courses, that allow students to explicitly develop the skills of writing, critical thinking, and information literacy within their disciplines; and
- Program Objective 3: Development of final scholarly projects in the capstone course that provide evidence of higher levels of writing, critical thinking, and information literacy.
FGCUScholars Courses are designated in each degree program and the General Education Program. The two types of designated courses in the majors are Scholarly-Enriched Courses and Scholarly-Focused Courses.
- Scholarly-Enriched Courses are designed to enhance student-learning of specific course content through the production of scholarly work that uses writing, critical thinking, and information literacy.
- Scholarly-Focused Courses are designed to teach students the skills that are fundamental to the production of scholarly work in the discipline, with specific emphasis on writing, critical thinking, and information literacy.
You can also search for these courses using FGCU's Course Schedule search tool.
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Business
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Education
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Engineering
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Health Professions and Social Work
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Humanities
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Natural Sciences
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Social Sciences
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Visual and Performing Arts
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Quality Enhancement Plan Archive
This website and its associated pages document the creation of Florida Gulf Coast University's second Quality Enhancement Plan.
Critical Thinking
At a time when society is bombarded with information from Internet sources like Wikipedia, from Twitter and Facebook, and from various blogs and media outlets, students must develop the ability to critically assess and differentiate mere opinion and belief from sound, evidence-based knowledge and reasoning. Critical thinking is a skill that not only allows students to develop well-informed opinions, make intelligent decisions, and identify the best course of action in various situations in life, but it also enables students to recognize faulty or manipulative reasoning in others. Moreover, it is a skill that is common to all academic disciplines—from mathematics, business, and philosophy, to physics, history, and literature—insofar as the core concern is to identify and question various uncritical assumptions and recognize how knowledge in that particular discipline is understood and interpreted as being legitimate (Maki, 2004; Brookfield, 2012).
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Why Think?
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Critical Thinking in Composition
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Business Critical Thinking
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Engineering Critical Thinking
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Education Critical Thinking
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Health Profession and Social Work Critical Thinking
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Humanities Critical Thinking
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Science Critical Thinking
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Social Science Critical Thinking
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Visual and Performing Arts Critical Thinking
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Written Communication
Writing is crucial to learning, not just in the writing classroom, but in all classrooms. Ideally, writing must be sustained throughout the curriculum for students to sufficiently develop their skills. According to Tim N. Taylor and Greg Peterson, “Writing stimulates thought and challenges students to communicate their ideas, so writing represents a valuable learning tool for any classroom. Writing is simply one of the best ways to provoke, evaluate, and assess student learning. Incorporating writing . . . promote[s] deeper discussion and understanding of course concepts” (p. 6). Thus, writing is a catalyst for synthesis and understanding of course content.
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Why Write?
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Writing in Composition
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Business Writing
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Engineering Writing
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Education Writing
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Health Profession and Social Work Writing
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Humanities Writing
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Science Writing
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Social Science Writing
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Visual and Performing Arts Writing
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Information Literacy
Welcome to the Information Age, where everyone is under a constant barrage of information from a plethora of sources. This explosion of information makes it nearly impossible for a person to learn everything needed for a lifetime of success during their years of formal schooling. To overcome this challenge, students must learn to become information seekers and managers if they expect to navigate the ever-changing world. The ability to find, analyze, and use information is essential in a democratic society and global culture since information literacy skills equip one for a lifetime of independent learning and personal empowerment. For more on the importance of information literacy and its role in undergraduate studies, see Todd Wiebe's article, "The Information Literacy Imperative in Higher Education." (PDF available through FGCU Library).
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Why Discover?
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Finding Information
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Understanding Information
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Using Information
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