The World Civilization curriculum at Tidewater Community College was redesigned to integrate basic skills with the content assignments. The targeted skills were library reference and research, geography, reading comprehension, critical analysis, grammar usage, and creative writing and thinking. During the first semester, World Civilization students were given a guided tour of the college library, where a reference guide for locating information about World Civilization was available. In order to help students develop a sense of geography, maps and a bibliography of historical atlases were distributed for each civilization studied. Supplemental exercises were developed to improve student skills and complement each study unit. The optional points earned from the supplemental tests could be used as substitutes for poor test scores. The supplemental exercises included identifying artifacts an archaeologist might discover in Egypt, discussing theories about different civilizations' religions, learning the functions of a city, and studying particular nationalities' values, traditions, and family and gender relationships. During the second semester, designed to build on the skills developed in the first semester, students read and reviewed two books from one of the historical periods studied, an exercise which helped students learn to critically evaluate while improving their reading and writing skills. The program also utilized individual conferences between the instructor and students in order to diagnose learning problems and corrective strategies and to enable the instructor to identify student interests. (WJT)