Evaluation of Student Performance: IST 511*



Evaluation of student work is done through participation in class, written work and a research presentation.
  1. Participation means showing the development of analytic skills and techniques for critically reviewing and explaining the literature from the various fields that comprise computational information sciences and related sciences and technologies.
  2. Writing includes brief powerpoint presentations on the topics covered and a longer paper summarizing the research and position of a particular topic in a field related to the course and computational methods. Student writing will be evaluated on the ability to showcase critical analysis, the use of concepts and theories, and the insight revealed in the types of questions and issues raised in the analysis.
  3. The research paper and presentation should cover a particular field or subfield related to computational informatics in IST and how the topic of interest relates to other areas of IST.  For more details please see the Research Paper and Presentation page.

Prior to each week's class: All students should read/summarize the assigned articles in a powerpoint style presentation.


During each week's class, class activities and discussion will center on issues such as:

    * What are the theories, issues, methods, and approaches surrounding these topics?
    * How would what was read be integrated into information sciences?
    * Which perspectives are strong (or weak) and what does this imply?
    * What are the issues with method or approach?
    * If the results are data dependent, does the data justify the results?
    * What do we know that makes this work worthwhile?
    * How does this week's work tie into other work we have read?
    * What else should we be reading?


Your grade will be based on four contributions:

  1. Written powerpoint summaries of material covered and class participation (30% of overall grade
  2. Exercises (20% of overall grade)
  3. Research paper (30% of overall grade).
  4. Research presentation (20% of overall grade).

* Some of this course description and structure was directly borrowed from previous IST 511's taught by Professors John Yen and Dongwon Lee.  They are gratefully acknowledged.