In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses.1 Several countries have added programming or computational thinking to their secondary education standards,2–4 and some physics departments now offer specialized courses and degrees in computational physics. Research5 and reports6,7 on computation in physics have identified some learning goals for computation: students should be able to use computers to handle and analyze data, read and interpret code, and produce and extract physical insight from computational models.
Furthermore, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)7 recommends the development of a robust, multimodal repository of discipline- and grade-level-appropriate assessment tasks. Although the Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP) website8 currently hosts many great computational physics activities, they do not specifically focus on assessment.
Thanks to recent efforts, we know more about how to teach computation in physics,9 but that’s only half the picture: we need to know how to assess it. In this paper, we respond to AAPT’s call for work on computational physics assessment activities by defining and providing a snapshot of two components of computational assessment: the assessment activity and the assessor’s focus.
We use the term assessment activity to refer to a broad category of task, such as exams or assignments, and the term assessor’s focus to refer to the object of the assessor’s attention and manner of assessment, such as a code’s output or a student’s interpretation of the code’s results into physical meaning. The assessment activity and assessor’s focus can be mixed and matched for better coverage of students’ learning.