Assessment Excellence

Using external accreditation criteria as benchmarks, ORU’s School of Education and Engineering Department serve as examples that the institution has begun documenting whether actual achievement levels of students are acceptable given the mission, student population, and resources available. Some majors and programs are in earlier stages of documentation, but making progress. To cite a specific example related to critical thinking, each student in the Principles of Chemistry lab course writes a 250-300 word abstract for a meat analysis lab exercise. The student’s hypothesis as to which of four types of meat is the healthiest and most cost-effective is then tested by analyzing the results of the lab experiment. The abstract is submitted electronically to a faculty member via ePortfolio under the Intellectually Alert outcome and Critical Thinking proficiency. The faculty member assesses the abstract using the Critical Thinking rubric criteria, which include a clearly identified purpose a...

A report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities states that a “purposeful educational program starts at the endpoint, with the desired characteristics of an institution’s graduates, and asks the faculty to reason backwards from outcomes to the implementation of an intentionally designed curriculum to cultivate the desired qualities.” This statement characterizes ORU’s process to articulate the University’s student learning outcomes with their accompanying proficiencies/capacities, as well as the development of the ePortfolio process. ORU’s School of Education has been collecting ePortfolio data since 2002. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has heralded the ORU School of Education’s ePortfolio system as an example for all member institutions. The Oklahoma State Board of Education has done likewise. It serves as a model for other ORU programs to determine whether student learning outcomes have been achieved. Undergraduate faculty in ...

ORU determines and communicates what counts as evidence that outcomes have been achieved. Each rubric informs students in advance of the expected performance criteria. After a faculty member evaluates an artifact using an online rubric, the student immediately receives feedback and knows the extent to which the assignment-specific outcomes were achieved. For example, the general education rubric for critical thinking artifacts includes such criteria as purpose/goal, hypothesis, evidence, conceptual understanding, assumptions, and inferences. Each rubric explains the levels of performance for each criterion. ORU regularly collects and interprets evidence of outcomes. Rubric results are aggregated for each specific criterion. This process indicates which criteria are and are not being acceptably met by the majority of students, as well as how different segments of the student population are performing (i.e., minorities, international students, females, home-schooled students, older stud...

ORU’s School of Education pioneered ePortfolio in 2002. The general education ePortfolio is required of all freshmen, sophomores, and juniors (seniors will be included in fall, 2007). In addition, all of ORU’s 63 undergraduate majors and programs, 15 masters programs, and 2 doctoral programs require the major ePortfolio for all students. At the beginning of each semester, ORU’s Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs orients new students to the ePortfolio program. He emphasizes the rationale, what is expected of each student, and how to use ePortfolio to track individual progress throughout the student’s experience at ORU. All new students are required to take the Career Direct Assessment and write and upload a reflection paper on the results, thus beginning their college careers “with the end in mind.” Each student receives professional feedback on the reflection paper. ORU has publicly committed to these specific student learning outcomes by making the ePortfolio a requirement ...

“The Lion, the Alice, and the ePortfolio” By Prof Lori Kanitz Department of English Oral Roberts University Once upon a time there was an English Department with fourteen faculty members. This is the story of something that happened to one of them when he was sent to his office during the assessment raids to work on ePortfolio. He was a not-so-old professor, Professor Mark Hall they called him, whose hair was not yet white and who lived in two offices, three floors apart, in a labyrinthine building on a university campus. In one of the offices (the one on the third floor that was really the first floor, mind you) were stacks of papers, piles of books, and mounds of folders, but behind all of these was, what to you and me, would look like an ordinary computer. This computer was far from ordinary, however. It was the portal to another world. One day, Professor Hall sat down at the computer to take care of an ordinary day’s work—three speeches before...

Since 2004, Oral Roberts University has employed a comprehensive rubric-evaluated University-wide ePortfolio system to assess its mission-focused learning outcomes as indicators of student progress. Students track their progress, while documenting that their educational experiences encompass more than academics. Data from student artifacts (essays, lab reports, video clips, reflection on co-curricular activities, etc.) are aggregated and disaggregated to measure student success and to make informed decisions for improvement of student learning through curricular and pedagogical refinements. Faculty members intentionally interact with students to inform them regarding their learning progress. Faculty members also regularly meet together to share ideas for improving assessment processes. Since 2002, Oral Roberts University (ORU) has fostered a learning-centered paradigm emphasizing engaged learning with closer interaction between students and mentor-teachers. ORU analyzed its student lea...

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Oral Roberts University (ORU) is a private, doctoral-granting university in Oklahoma. It has focused on student learning outcomes through a variety of means, including a university-wide electronic portfolio system that documents how well students fulfill the five learning outcomes that are identified in the university mission statement. Graduates are expected to demonstrate that they are spiritually alive, intellectually alert, physically disciplined, socially adept and professionally competent. Students are required to maintain portfolios in general education as well as major or program. Faculty evaluates the evidence contained in the portfolios to measure student success.