Posts Tagged Lecture-based class

Rubric for term paper drafts

Guidance for TAs for how to assign grades on a term paper draft. Includes a single-category rubric for the draft (based on effort and completeness) as well as a single-category rubric for the final paper (based on quality). This second rubric was used to supply an “advisory grade” in addition to the first-draft effort/completeness grade. From MIT’s Principles of Applied Mathematics.

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Proof with guiding text

This annotated proof illustrates how to format a theorem and proof and how to use guiding text to communicate the structure of the proof. Comments about formatting assume that students may not be using LaTeX. The text is an excerpt from the lecture notes for M.I.T.’s Principles of Applied Mathematics, on the topic of the pigeonhole principle.

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Handout re: explaining algorithms

This student handout gives guidance for explaining algorithms clearly. Advice includes knowing the knowledge level of the audience, stating the algorithm’s purpose before going into details, indicating the structure of the explanation, defining new terms in context, viewing a draft from the point of view of a reader, asking for peer feedback, and proofreading. From MIT’s Principles of Applied Mathematics.

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Choosing a Term Paper Topic-HW

This assignment guides students to choose a term paper topic that will enable them to “add value” beyond what is provided in their sources (e.g., explaining the material clearly to an audience of students, synthesizing the presentations in multiple sources, etc.). The assignment, which is from M.I.T.’s Principles of Applied Mathematics, includes a list of suggested topics in discrete applied mathematics.

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Principles of Applied Mathematics

This lecture-based course at M.I.T. was originally developed by Daniel Kleitman. It was transformed into the form published here (2011) by Peter Shor, Michel Goemans, Neil Olver, Olivier Bernardi, and Susan Ruff. Communication instruction has since greatly increased, as presented on MIT’s Open Courseware. The text below documents the old version of the course, as well as some of the reasons for the more recent changes. Until 2012, one lecture was devoted to writing topics (information order and connectivity), but most writing instruction came in the form of online resources and feedback on writing assignments. Enrollment is typically about 50; thus feedback on

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