IDS-100 explores the four general education lenses of academic inquiry: Humanities, History, Social Science, and Natural Science. It applies these lenses as a framework for understanding relevant topics, distinguishing opinion from research, and communicating ideas clearly. Students build information literacy skills using library resources and demonstrate how the same topic is represented differently through each of these four lenses.
Four disciplinary lenses as a genuine analytical toolkit
The course's core structure is built around four distinct disciplinary lenses, giving students a genuine, reusable analytical toolkit for approaching any topic from multiple academic angles rather than defaulting to a single familiar discipline.
Distinguishing opinion from research as a foundational skill
IDS-100 explicitly teaches students to distinguish opinion from research, a foundational information-literacy skill that underpins credible academic work across every subsequent course in a liberal arts curriculum.
Key topics in IDS100
- The Humanities lens of academic inquiry
- The History lens
- The Social Science lens
- The Natural Science lens
- Distinguishing opinion from research
- Information literacy using library resources
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Worked example: one topic through four lenses
- Single-lens approach: Analyzing a topic like climate change only through a Natural Science lens
- IDS-100's approach: Examining that same topic through Humanities, History, Social Science, and Natural Science lenses together
- Lesson: IDS-100 teaches that applying this full liberal arts toolkit reveals dimensions of any topic that a single-discipline approach would miss entirely
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Frequently asked questions
Each academic discipline genuinely approaches a topic with different questions, methods, and standards of evidence, and a student who only ever applies one familiar lens misses the distinct insights the other disciplines could offer on the same topic. IDS-100 structures itself around these four lenses because building this multi-disciplinary toolkit early prepares students to approach any subsequent course or subject with a genuinely broader analytical range.
Credible academic work across every discipline depends on being able to tell the difference between someone's unsupported opinion and a claim genuinely backed by research evidence, and this is a foundational skill that a student needs before they can meaningfully engage with any of the four disciplinary lenses the course covers. IDS-100 teaches this distinction explicitly because it underlies the information-literacy competency that the entire liberal arts curriculum depends on.