Modernizing a General Education Requirement in Computing to Emphasize Critical Thinking

In this paper, we describe the process of replacing a general education requirement in computing at a private liberal arts/professional American university. The original requirement evaluated students' ability to utilize spreadsheet and presentation software, meaning traditional CS1 courses did not satisfy the requirement. The new requirement emphasizes critical thinking and requires students to create digital artifacts in order to solve problems or analyze models in their major discipline. We describe our motivations for updating the general education requirement, and the feedback that we received during the revision process. We also describe the learning outcomes used during the assessment process. We briefly describe the results from the previous cycle of assessment in 2014 using the original requirement as well as the results from the current cycle in 2020 using the new requirement. Rather than being limited to spreadsheet and presentation software, assessed student artifacts in 2020 also included Excel, Python, MATLAB, and Mathematica source code, as well as written analyses. We conclude with recommendations from the assessment team for improving the general education requirement and associated assessment procedure.