Objectives-Based Assessment

Assessment Overview

Final course grades are assigned based on students’ demonstration of 30 standards based on the course learning objectives.

Mini-projects and the final research project each have an engagement component worth 10 points. This score is based on the investment you demonstrate in learning the course material separate from meeting learning objectives. Refer to the grading policies for details.

Research project

Students’ final research projects should demonstrate all 30 standards. Students may submit working drafts of their projects up to 4 times throughout the quarter (max 1 per week). The project grade will reflect the standards met in the final submission, which may be any time during the quarter.

  • There are very high expectations for the research project; meeting each standard equates to 1 point of your final course grade. Each draft submission is an opportunity to see which standards you have met so far and to add or revise as needed.
  • Drafts take time to grade, especially as the quarter progresses and I receive more submissions each week. Anticipate a turnaround time of about a week, though it will likely be quicker earlier in the quarter.
  • Only the final submission needs to be a complete draft. I encourage you to submit incremental drafts as we progress through the syllabus. For example, your first draft might just demonstrate GitHub and Markdown skills, your second adds basic programming and data wrangling, your third adds visualization and analysis, and your fourth is a complete draft correcting previous mistakes.
  • In theory, any attempt can be your final submission at any point in the quarter. In other words, if you’re a real overachiever and work ahead to produce a full draft that meets all 30 standards in Week 5, you’re done! Or, you may decide that the draft that met 20 standards is actually good enough to meet your personal goals for the class and your final grade and opt not to submit additional attempts.

Learn about the final research project here and find answers to common questions on the FAQ page.

Mini-projects

Additionally, students should demonstrate mastery of the standards across at least assessed “mini-projects” supplemental to their research project. Student may choose from the “menu” of assessments and/or propose their own.

  • Along with each assessment you will submit a checklist of the standards, marking off each standard you are attempting to demonstrate.
  • Across all assessments, you should demonstrate at least 20 unique assessed standards (20 points).
  • An additional 20 points may be earned by:
    • demonstrating some combination of 10 assessed standards (not necessarily unique) and/or unassessed learning objectives
      • The list of “unassessed learning objectives” includes things I hope you will come away from the class having learned but that are not necessarily practical skills I expect you to demonstrate. Showing that you have met these objectives might not easily take the form of a technical, applied project. The menu has several options for this approach, but you are also welcome to design your own.
    • completing an “off-the-syllabus” project
      • If you’re feeling ambitious and/or bored with the course material, you can fulfill some or all of those 20 points with an “off-the-syllabus” (OtS) project. In this option, you’ll take the initiative to independently learn a few skills beyond the scope of this class (they should still be clearly related to the course!!). The menu has several options for OtS projects, but I encourage you to tailor this to your specific interests. If you design your own, you must submit a brief, informal proposal for approval.
  • Aside from the “menu” provided, you are welcome to design your own assessment! This can be a great chance to cross off some standards that don’t neatly map onto one of the existing assessments or to try out a skill not covered in this class with the “off-the-syllabus” option. Submit your design for approval by emailing me a brief description of the project along with a checklist of which standards you anticipate meeting (or for the OtS option, which off-syllabus skills you are hoping to practice). You must receive my approval before submitting, but I promise I am very, very flexible with this!
  • Typically mini-projects may not be resubmitted, with occasional exception at my discretion. This is typically when I see that just a few very quick and easy fixes are necessary or when the work has significantly missed the mark and should be started from scratch.

Read about the mini-projects here and find answers to common questions on the FAQ page.

Learning objectives

The overall goal of this course is to develop a workflow for producing scientific manuscripts using RStudio and GitHub. This workflow includes data wrangling, visualization, analysis, and manuscript composition. The course is designed to be hands-on and project-based, with a focus on learning by doing and active collaboration with others in the classroom community.

There are 30 “assessed” objectives that must be demonstrated in the final project and mini-projects. These fall into 8 categories:

  1. GitHub and RStudio
  2. R programming
  3. Tidyverse
  4. Data visualization with ggplot2
  5. Data analysis
  6. BibTeX
  7. Notebooks and code chunks
  8. R Markdown and Quarto

There are also “unassessed” objectives that are not required for the course grade but are still things you should come away from the class with. These tend to be conceptual skills or “softer” skills. They may be demonstrated in the mini-projects as part of the additional 20 points earned beyond the 20 for unique, assessed standards. You are not required to demonstrate these objectives in your research project, but incorporating them can enhance the overall quality of your project and add to the engagement component of the project grade.

Unassessed objectives fall into 3 categories:

  1. Troubleshooting, debugging, and best practices
  2. RStudio & R
  3. Conceptual skills

You can view the full list of learning objectives here. You can view the assessment.md and research-assessment.md files in the centralized assessment repo to see detailed suggestions for how to meet these objectives in your mini-projects and final project, respectively.