Assessing and refining an undergraduate computational science curriculum

AbstractWe describe our experiences with curriculum development and learning assessment in a new undergraduate computational science program. We report on the development and pilot testing of assessment tools in both core and cognate courses. Specifically, we detail a diagnostic assessment that predicted success in our introductory computational science course with reasonable reliability; we give an account of our use of an existing assessment tool to investigate how introducing computational thinking in a cognate course influences learning of the traditional course material; and we discuss developing a pancurriculum rubric for scoring computational science projects