Full integration of computation and broad-scale assessment approaches at IUPUI

Our goal as a department is to “make computation normal.” That is, our students should graduate considering computational methods as a normal means of approaching physics problems, on par with analytical techniques. To accomplish this goal, we have embarked on an effort to incorporate computational methods as significant part of every course taken by our majors. Our baseline goal is that at least 25% of all work will be computational in nature. This talk will focus on three aspects of the project: the change process that underlies this effort, the lessons we learned during the process, and our efforts to assess and revise. We have largely completed the goal of incorporating computational methods at the 25% level, and we are now focusing our efforts on assessing the results to guide ongoing change. We have developed a survey instrument that measures students’ attitudes and self-efficacy with respect to key computational methods. We have established the validity and reliability of this instrument and will show results obtained using it [1]. We will also describe ongoing efforts to evaluate student achievement of our learning goals using a two-tiered rubric approach.



[1] A. Gavrin, G. Vemuri, and D. Maric, 2021 PERC Proceedings, eds M. B. Bennett, B. W. Frank, and R. E. Vieyra, doi:10.1119/perc.2021.pr.Gavrin