Weekly Learning Reflections¶
The intent of learning reflections are two-fold:
- Give you an opportunity to look back at what you learned this week and try to summarize your learning. Lots of research shows that this act of reflection and summarization is a crucial part of long-term learning. Summarization is a key step to helping build up a mental-model.
- Helps you build up a reference sheet for each week. This can be something you look back on when studying for an exam or if you want to reference something you learned after this quarter. The learning reflection is designed to be a good reference sheet for you in the future.
Required Sections¶
The format and content of your learning reflection can be entirely up to you, but you must clearly include the following three elements:
1 - Summary**¶
Include a brief summary of what you learned this week. This should be an English description in about 2-4 sentences rather than a list of topics. The point here is to summarize not enumerate every inidividual topic. Think of it like telling a friend who missed class all week what was covered at a high-level.
2 - Concepts¶
Provide a list of topics/terms/concepts we learned this week. This would be more detailed than your summary from the last section and you should include definitions or descriptions along with the terms. You need to include at least 5 concepts, but please include as many as are helpful for your review of the week’s material.
A useful mindset is that this should be a good reference sheet to look at for this week’s material. So you probably don’t want to it be so detailed that it’s everything said in class word-for-word, but you probably want something more than just the term “Linear Regression”.
3 - Uncertainties¶
What questions about course concepts do you have or what topics are you not so certain about yet? This is not submitting questions to the course staff to answer! This is you writing down for yourself what things you don’t think make 100% sense yet, which can help guide your future study both next week and coming weeks. So think of these as you writing down what you find confusing right now, and are going to look into figuring out over the next week(s)..
Questions you come up with here would be great things to also ask on the message board or come to office hours to help you further your learning.
Submission¶
You should submit your learning reflection on Gradescope. You can upload a PDF to Gradescope to submit. You can submit as many times as you want and we will take your last submission. Recall that you can’t use late days on learning reflections.
Please be careful which learning reflection you are turning in. Make sure you are submitting to the right one and you are turning in the right file. It’s your responsibility to look over what you submit to make sure it is the right version.
You’re also encouraged to build on your learning reflections in the future after the due date! It would be great if they are living documents! For submissions and grading though, you should turn in what you have by the due date.
Grading¶
Since the learning reflections are for your learning, we don’t have any particular requirements on format or length as long as you clearly include the 3 elements above. We will grade your learning reflection based on completion and effort, so this is not supposed to be anything stressful. If you make a reasonable effort at completing the 3 elements above and turn it in on time, you will receive full credit. There is no particular length requirements, but we would expect that your learning reflection will be about a page or two long.
Each learning reflection will be out of 2 points. Any submission that is turned in on time and shows a serious effort to answering the 3 elements above will earn 2/2. Submissions that don’t show an effort made on at least one of the elements above will receive a ½. Missing submissions or ones that show very little effort in answering these components above will not receive credit.