And so it begins

Welcome to the Reproducible Assessment blog! I am finding this first post to be a bit awkward to write. So, I am just going to start by sharing a little bit about my purposes for creating this site and describing what sorts of things that I plan to discuss here.

I am a microbiologist by training, and am used to dealing with lots of quantitative data. So that is my normal bias for approaching assessment of student learning. Over the past couple of years, I have become very interested in the reproducible research movement in the social and hard sciences. In fact, I have completed the instructor training for Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry.

Over time, I plan to discuss the application of the (free!) tools of reproducible research to the assessment of student learning. These tools may include make, R, RStudio, GitHub, markdown, SQLite, Python, Excel, and more. I’ll also discuss pedagogies that seem to work and evidence to support those claims as well as some “best practices” for the actual assessment process. Everything that I put up here will be released with an MIT license - so feel free to copy it, share it, modify it, and use it. I’ve added a Disqus forum to this blog, so feel free to comment (whether you agree with me or not). Thanks for checking this out. I look forward to getting some of this stuff out of my head and out for public discussion.

Until next time,

Cliff