Two Self-Assessments
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
A recurring problem with our workshops is the diversity of learners' backgrounds. Below are the results of two pre-workshop self-assessments (on different groups), one phrased in terms of content, the other in terms of specific tasks. The consistency is better than I expected: broadly speaking, it seems that people's impression of how much they know about X is more or less in line with their belief about whether they could do something that requires understanding X. The next step will be to follow up a few weeks after the workshop to see if they actually can do X.
Survey 1| never heard of it | know what it is / might have used it occasionally | use it but don't really understand it | use it regularly and feel I understand it well | expert | |
| bash shell scripting | 9% | 31% | 19% | 41% | 0% |
| version control (so you can "rollback" changes) | 47% | 44% | 6% | 3% | 0% |
| make (e.g. automated analysis) | 44% | 31% | 19% | 6% | 0% |
| simple python including lists and dictionaries | 12% | 38% | 16% | 28% | 6% |
| adding unit tests to python scripts | 66% | 22% | 3% | 9% | 0% |
| useful python modules (numpy and scipy) | 28% | 31% | 16% | 25% | 0% |
| MDAnalysis (load a protein structure into python) | 41% | 31% | 6% | 19% | 3% |
| could do easily | could probably struggle through | wouldn't know where to start | |
| A tab-delimited file has two columns: the date, and the highest temperature on that day. Produce a graph showing the average highest temperature for each month. | 69% | 21% | 8% |
| Write a short program to read a file containing columns of numbers separated by commas, average the non-negative values in the second and fifth columns, and print the results. | 15% | 32% | 52% |
| In a directory with 1000 text files, create a list of all files that contain the word Drosophila, and redirect the output to a file called results.txt. | 13% | 26% | 60% |
| A database has two tables Scientist and Lab. The Scientist table's columns are the scientist's student ID, name, and email address; the Lab table's columns are lab names, lab IDs, and scientist IDs. Write an SQL statement that outputs a count of the number of scientists in each lab. | 6% | 10% | 82% |
| Check out a working copy of a project from version control, add a file called paper.txt, and commit the change. | 6% | 13% | 80% |