Initiating a Programmatic Assessment Report

摘要

In the context of a department of applied mathematics, a program assessment was conducted to assess the departmental goal of enabling undergraduate students to recognize, appreciate, and apply the power of computational tools in solving mathematical problems that cannot be solved by hand, or would require extensive and tedious hand computation. A test was designed and administered in order to discover whether students are adept at thinking computationally at various levels of mathematical maturity in the program. The results were explained by the mathematical maturation that goes hand-in-hand with the development of computational thinking.