Direct Assessment of Student Learning

Each academic department at Oral Roberts University has a designated faculty member to coordinate its ePortfolio processes, called a Subadministrator. The Subadministrator enters departmental outcomes, rubrics, and demographic survey questions into ePortfolio; runs reports; aggregates, disaggregates, and analyzes the performance data; informs the department and school about student progress related to learning outcomes; conducts research; and exports raw or filtered data into a database for further analysis. When interpreting the data, departments often confer with ORU’s ePortfolio Administrator or the Institutional Improvement and Student Learning Committee, which has general oversight of assessment issues.

In addition to using ePortfolio to document student learning, some departments utilize major field tests and/or gather data on student success on professional or licensure exams. The University also conducts the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) Test for second semester sophomores as a direct assessment of the effectiveness of the general education curriculum. The CAAP scores for critical thinking, science reasoning, and mathematics are then linked to the students’ ACT entrance exam scores (or their SAT equivalents) to measure the extent to which students are achieving their potential for success in college.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Usefulness of ePortfolio Data

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...
Read more

Using Student Learning Outcomes for Program Improvement

As part of the process to use outcomes for improvement, ORU regularly incorporates information about success with student learning outcomes in discussions and decision-making processes at all levels. At least twice during most semesters, faculty members who serve as course coordinators meet to discuss student learning outcomes. They revise course assessment rubrics to better measure student learning, determine which assignments should be designated as ePortfolio artifacts for data analysis, and ensure that student learning outcomes further the mission of the department, school, and University. Student learning outcome results are integral to the ORU program review process. Faculty members from each major and program compile a self-study document, incorporating variables such as student learning results harvested from ePortfolio and other sources. The program review process also includes surveying students, faculty, alumni, employers, and graduate faculty of alumni who pursue graduate d...
Read more

ePortfolio Data for External Accreditation

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 ...
Read more