NOTE: This was originally the assignment for the Week 3 seminar, but we moved it to Week 4 to make room for another session, in Week 3, about reading textbooks well.
In weeks 1 and 2, we’ve asked you to read and think about what it means to be a liberally educated person and what it means to be educated in the mathematical sciences.
This week’s reading continues in a similar fashion, but this time offers some learning goals/outcomes produced for physics. The document linked just below brings together Course-Scale Learning Goals produced at the University of Colorado Boulder and Learning Outcomes for the Undergraduate Lab Curriculum recommended by the Committee on Laboratories of the American Association of Physics Teachers:
For this week’s seminar, we’d like you to give your own account of what it means to be an educated person in your chosen direction of study. What are your learning goals? What capacities do you need or want to develop? Create a complete list, with a few sentences explaining each one: why is each goal/capacity important, and how might you reach/develop it?
As you make your list, feel free to draw from documents you’ve already seen:
- [1] The Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate
- [2] The PSAM Program Learning Goals
- [3] Cronon’s “Only Connect”
- [4] The CUPM Curriculum Guide
- [5] The Harvey Mudd College Department of Mathematics Goals
- [6] CU Boulder Physics Course-Scale Learning Goals
- [7] AAPT Undergraduate Physics Lab Curriculum Learning Outcomes
- Your own writing from the first two Seminars
Please also feel free to find and draw from other such documents. Note, too, that this kind of comprehensive, aspirational thinking is the kind of work we will ask you to do when you write your Academic Statement, so it’s worth thinking about this assignment in connection with that document; look at your current draft of your Academic Statement to see what learning goals are implicitly embedded in it.
- Bring a printed copy of your list of your personal learning goals/capacities to Seminar. You will share it with your classmates during Seminar.
- You might exactly quote from learning goals/capacities you have read in other documents as you produce your own list. Make sure you have indicated when that happens, and include a brief bibliography. You might use the bracketed numbers [1], [2], etc. as in the list of links above so as to improve the readability of your list.
- At the end of Seminar, you will submit your printed copy for faculty review: faculty will look for evidence of completion and engagement.
- Make sure your name is at the top of your printed copy.