By Gracia Dong (University of Toronto) & Amanda Ng (University of Toronto)
Information
Within an introductory statistics course with approximately 400 life science undergraduate students across multiple sections at a large Canadian research university, we introduce formative, auto-graded pre-assessment checks using MarkUs, an autograder for coding assessments (Magnin et al., 2012). These assessments give students opportunities to verify their understanding and gain assurance in their skills, and are used across many courses within the Department of Computer Science, and are met with positive response by students. In our course, students complete these formative assessments after learning the materials in lecture and completing an ungraded interactive R tutorial. but prior to completing larger Lab assignments. These assessments allow multiple submission attempts, instantaneous feedback, and are graded on a completion basis. Student reflections regarding this assessment are collected via their weekly course reflection surveys, which are graded on a completion basis. This Beyond session will present a demonstration of the students’ process through the autograded assessment, including a demonstration of how unit tests are set up using the RMarkus package, which is built on top of the testthat package (Wickham, 2011).