Mid-Course Reflection

We reflect on our learning, engagement, and achievement in the first part of the semester.

Published

April 5, 2023

Instructions

  • Download this notebook
  • Open the notebook in an editor of your choice. I recommend JupyterLab for this one, but you can pick.
  • Delete the first two cells of the notebook (i.e. this one and the raw cell above).
  • Briefly review the goals you set for yourself in our goal-setting activity at the beginning of the course. You can find your goals on Canvas.
  • In the The Data section, replace the blanks with brief responses.
  • In the What You Learned and Reflecting on Goals sections, write down your reflections on your learning, achievement, and presence in CSCI 0451 in the provided markdown cells.
  • Take some time to reflect on your responses so far. When you’re ready, review the soundbytes describing letter grades.
  • Take some time to reflect on your responses so far. When you’re ready, propose the letter grade that you feel best reflects your learning, participation, and achievement in CSCI 0451 so far.
  • Optionally, respond to the last prompt with some thoughts on how the semester is going and what we might do to help you meet your goals for the course.
  • Submit the notebook as a PDF on Canvas.

We’ll discuss your reflection and your proposed letter grade during our end-of-semester conference.

There are lots of ways to render Jupyter notebooks as PDFs. The simplest way is to run this at the command line, after you’ve navigated to the location of the notebook:

jupyter nbconvert --to pdf mid-course.ipynb

CSCI 0451: Mid-Course Reflection

[your name here]

The Data

In this section I’ll ask you to fill in some data. You don’t have to give precise numbers – approximate, conversational responses are fine. For example, when I ask “how often have you attended class,” good answers include “almost always,” “I’ve missed three times,” “about 75% of the time,” “not as often as I want,” etc.

Presence in Class

  • How often have you attended class? (e.g. “almost always,” “I missed three times,” etc.) ____
  • How often have you taken notes on the core readings ahead of the class period? ____
  • How often have you been prepared to present the daily warm-up exercise to your team, even if you weren’t actually called? ____
  • How many times have you actually presented the daily warm-up to your team? ____
  • How many times have you asked your team for help while presenting the daily warm-up? ____
  • How often have you learned something new from a teammate’s presentation of the daily warm-up? ____
  • How often have you helped a teammate during the daily warm-up presentation? ____

Presence Outside of Class

  • How often have you attended Student Hours or Peer Help? ____
  • How often have you asked for or received help from your fellow students? ____
  • Have you been regularly participating in a study group outside class? ____
  • How often have you posted questions or answers in Slack? ____

Assignments and Effort

  • How many blog posts have you submitted? ____
  • How many of your submitted blog posts are at each of the following feedback stages?
    • No revisions suggested: ____
    • Revisions useful: ____
    • Revisions encouraged: ____
    • Incomplete: ____
  • Roughly how many hours per week have you spent on this course outside of class? ____

What You’ve Learned

At the beginning of the course, you may have expressed an interest in focusing a little extra on one or two of the following four categories:

  • Theory: mathematical descriptions of frameworks and algorithms.
  • Implementation: effective coding and use of tools in order to implement efficient machine learning algorithms.
  • Experimentation: performing experiments to assess the performance of algorithms and clearly communicating about the results.
  • Social responsibility: critical analysis of sources of bias and harm in machine learning algorithms; theoretical formulations of fairness and bias

Did you choose to focus on any of these categories? If so, what have you done in order to pursue your interest?

[your response here]

Reflecting on Goals

For each of the categories below, replace the “[your response here]” cell with 1-2 paragraphs in which you reflect on the following questions:

  • In what ways are you on track to meet your goals from the beginning of the course? Be specific: explain what the goal is and what you are doing in order to meet it.
  • In what ways are you not on track to meet your goals from the beginning of the course? Be specific: explain what the goal is and what gap you see between where you are and your goal.
  • If there’s any context you want to share about how you are faring relative to your goals, please do!

Blog Posts

[your response here]

Course Presence (Participation)

[your response here]

Project

[your response here]

Other

Is there anything else that you want to share with me about what you have learned, how you have participated, or what you have achieved in CSCI 0451?

[your response here]

Updating Your Goals

From your experience in CSCI 0451 and your other classes this semester, you may feel moved to make modifications to your goals. Are they still feasible? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? If you would like to revise any of your goals from your reflective goal-setting, you can do so below. For each goal you want to modify:

  1. Clearly state what the goal was.
  2. Clearly state how you’ve done on that goal so far.
  3. Clearly state your proposed revised goal for the remainder of the course.

[your response here]

Grade and Goals

Take 15 minutes to look back on your responses in each of the sections above. Then, state the letter grade that you feel reflects your learning, participation, and achievement in CSCI 0451 so far. Here are some soundbytes to help guide your thinking:

What a Grade Sounds Like

An A sounds like:

  • “I am very proud of my time in this course.”
  • “I have grown significantly in multiple ways that matter to me.”
  • “I am ready to take the theory, techniques, and ideas of this course into my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”

A B sounds like:

  • “I had some opportunities to learn more, overall I feel good about my time in this course.”
  • “I am able to explain some new things or achieve new tasks.”
  • “I can see a few ideas from this course that will be relevant for my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”

A C sounds like:

  • “I often made a good effort, but I missed many opportunities to get more out of my time in this course.”
  • “I might be able to complete some new tasks related to the course content, but only with significant further guidance.”
  • “I don’t see any ways to take the contents of this course into my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”

You might find that some of these soundbytes resonate and other’s don’t! Take some time, see what feels right, and don’t be afraid to celebrate your achievements.

Upon reflection, I feel that my learning, participation, and achievement in CSCI 0451 (so far) are best reflected by a grade of ____

(Optional:) How to Improve?

You may feel disappointed by your reflection. Sometimes we don’t achieve all our goals – it happens and it’s normal! If you are feeling disappointed by how you’ve learned, participated, or achieved in CSCI 0451, then feel free to write something about that below. Feel free to just write your feelings. If you have ideas for how to move forward, include those too! We’ll talk.

[your response here]



© Phil Chodrow, 2023