This syllabus was developed to be a three-credit/hour course that meets twice a week, allows a maximum of 15 students. Modifications for a larger audience include reducing the number of individual presentations, which can be substituted by group activities.  

If you scroll down the page a little more you will find some Samples of major Assessments and Evaluations I planed for this course. 

Regular form of assessment:

• Instructions: Based on the weekly readings, submit a list of 2-5 questions related to each one of the assigned readings two days before the class, and write a three-page essay due at class start hour through BBL. The questions should refer to the context of the relative reading, and indicate which passage of the text that inspired your question. In the essay, I expect you to develop a thesis, and use the assigned readings to support your arguments and elaborate on examples. I expect the essays to have an introduction paragraph that contextualizes the topics you will cover on the essay, and have a conclusion paragraph that recap your thesis. You will have the chance to post a total of 12 essays and questions, and the average of the 10 best grades will correspond to 30% (essays) and 15% (questions) of the your final grade. 

• Goals: stimulate a critical reading of the articles and books, and allow connection between the different topics covered throughout the semester.

• Objectives: to keep the students updated with the weekly readings, and prepare the students for in-class discussion. 

• Rubric for essay can be found here.

In-class assessment

• instructions: During the semester you will have the opportunity to give a 50 minute lecture in our the class. In this lecture you will be expected to present two of the assigned methodological readings of the week, covering the main topics presented by the authors and promoting a discussions with the class. Furthermore, students will be asked to bring relevant research in primatology using these methods and promote a critical discussion of the articles. This discussion must bring some of the relevant questions posted by other students, and if possible make relationship with other topics covered in the course. You can use different types of media (such as movies, power point presentation, songs), to compose your lecture. You will also have to prepare a handout for your colleagues, providing some definitions, summaries and concepts.

• Goals: Get used to public speaking, and to leading discussions. 

• Objectives: Summarize main contents presented in the literature, critically accounting for other readers perspectives. Expand the contents covered in class to relevant research in primatology. 

• Rubric for presentation can be found here.

Major form of evaluation:

• Instructions: During the course, students will perform four laboratory practices in which they will learn how to perform basic data manipulation and analyses in the field of genomics. By the end of the course, students will have to prepare a final paper integrating the analyses and results in the form of a manuscript following the structure of a standard scientific article (i.e., including Abstract, Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, and References). The topics covered in the four laboratories are 1) obtaining genetic data from public repositories (e.g., Genbank, Dryad) and basic bioinformatic manipulations; 2) inference of population genetic structure using clustering analyses (e.g., Structure, sNMF); 3) estimation of historical relationships among samples using phylogenetic methods based on Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian inference (RaXML, SVD Quartets); 4) testing for genetic signatures of adaptation by performing pairwise tests of genomic outliers (Manhattan plots).

• Goals: Integrate the theory, methods, and practice of data analysis. 

• Objectives: Expose the student to the main methods in genomic data analysis. Consolidate the methods and theories applied and discussed throughout the semester and practice the academic writing.

• Rubrics for the final project (scientific manuscript) can be found here.