Assessments#
Formative Assessment#
Formative assessment is often ungraded and reflective assessment. It is meant to help you make changes to your thinking, approaches, or practice. It is not evaluative, it’s corrective; to help you make changes. We will make heavy use of ungraded formative feedback throughout the course. Our weekly readings and your worked problems are meant to be formative; meaning most folks will receive full credit, but the important part to review the feedback and reflect on it.
Summative Assessment#
Summative assessment is typically evaluative and will take the form of course projects completed out of class. These projects will take the form of a computational essay in which you write mathematics and code to investigate and explain a given phenomenon of interest. We will explore those essays in class and talk about what makes a useful one as we define a rubric for evaluation.
Preliminary Rubric#
A preliminary rubric has been posted. We will use this rubric for the first out-of-class project evaluation. We will then reflect on it and make changes to collectively as a class.
Resources for Computational Essays#
If you want to read more about computational essays, here’s a few links in the order utility/readability:
Steven Wolfram - What is a Computational Essay?
University of Oslo Physics - Examples of Computational Essays
Odden and Burk, The Physics Teacher - Computational Essays in the Physics Classroom
Odden, Lockwood, and Caballero, Physical Review PER - Physics computational literacy: An exploratory case study using computational essays