Edward Brown edited future-steps.tex  about 9 years ago

Commit id: 830cf10e04c4032b5f9c9ae52940b67fffdf79dd

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The instructors believe that the synchronization of lecture and lab topics, and especially the focus on statistics in the first half of the semester, has improved the quality of student work in the lab. Finding the right balance of topics in the lecture will require further iterations of the course, and at least one more semester of significant development by both instructors.  Based on our experience with this semester's edition, we will expand the pre-test to include problems on statistics and ``foundational'' foundational  topics in astronomy, such as the inverse square law for  flux. These pre-test questions are asked again on the final to provide a measurement of the student gain (eq.~\ref{eqn:gain}). This allows us to assess how well we are doing as we make further changes to the course. Our revisions to the course are thoroughly documented, so that future editions can take advantage of our efforts.  The material for the lectures, including syllabus, notes, \ipython\ notebooks, pre-test, and quizzes, is currently stored in a private \href{http://git-scm.com/}{git} repository. At the end of the Spring 2015 semester, the notes and \ipython\ notebooks will be forked into a public \href{https://github.com/}{GitHub} repository;