Chalk & Wire

Cameron University

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In the end our Department of Education passed through the NCATE visit with flying colors. NCATE’s SVP, Donna M. Gollnick, was even quoted as saying that “Cameron University demonstrates the high standards the profession has set for educator preparation.”

Creating a proactive and positive assessment culture.

With a looming NCATE visit, the Department of Education leadership team realized that in order to receive our re-accreditation we needed a more systematic way of collecting evidence of student achievement. At that time, our 350 undergraduate and graduate students were developing well and creating learning artifacts which proved they were academically sound and on their way to meeting NCATE standards. However, as an institution we had no way of proving it.

It was crucial for us to make a decision to go with a solution provider that could not only provide us with the technology to achieve our goals, but also to provide the hands on attention we needed to do it quickly and in a sustainable fashion.

Decision to go with Chalk & Wire.

After meeting with the Chalk & Wire CEO, Geoff Irvine, at the annual AACTE conference we started to look at their company as a possible option. Geoff spent countless hours explaining how Chalk & Wire could help the Department of Education get its data organized and analyzed for a successful NCATE re-accreditation visit. Those initial meetings gave us a very strong message about Chalk & Wire’s commitment to make us successful.

As part of our due diligence we also made the decision to visit other universities that were current Chalk & Wire clients and see how their assessment process worked first hand. Without exception all of the universities were satisfied with how the product allowed them to assess student content based on standards. It was extremely helpful to see the entire process in action and this served as our proof of concept that Chalk & Wire would work for us as well.

Getting data organized

Much of our initial focus was on transferring work students were doing in offline portfolios to online portfolios. We wanted to have the flexibility to not have to change our existing approach drastically. It was important that we could take our existing student artifacts (or assignments) and just get them into Chalk & Wire instead of having to introduce new learning tasks and administrative overhead. The flexibility to structure their portfolios based on a table of contents allowed us to easily do this.

While working to get the student assignments online, we also started to take student data we already had scattered around in spreadsheets and prep it for import. We used Chalk & Wire’s import tools to link our legacy data from current and past students to their data point accounts. There was lots of data to sift through and we only wanted to import things that would be relevant. The Chalk & Wire team worked with us very closely on deciding what to import. We were pleasantly surprised with the responsiveness of their support team approach, never having to wait for more than a day to get our issues resolved.

Once all of our portfolio templates and assessment instruments were online, we turned to deploying the application. Training staff and students to use the system was something that we initially held some reservation about. However, when it came time to hold the training it did not require more than an hour for faculty members to get up to speed. It was probably one of the easiest training processes, from an end-user standpoint, that we ever had.

Outcome of a highly successful visit

In the end our Department of Education passed through the NCATE visit with flying colors. NCATE’s SVP, Donna M. Gollnick, was even quoted as saying that “Cameron University demonstrates the high standards the profession has set for educator preparation.” This was a huge win for our school and was recognized so by our leadership team. Our President Cindy Ross stated that “the Department of Education has accomplished something that is rarely done—receiving the highest score possible on this critical accreditation review."¹

Overall we truly had an outstanding accreditation visit and one that we eventually felt very prepared for. It was extremely satisfying being able to showcase how our students were achieving the standards which we set for them. We could even answer the questions that were not expected simply by running on-the-spot reports. Without the service we got from Chalk & Wire this would have been impossible. Their dedication was off the charts.

Assessment system solidly in place

Moving forward we are completely dedicated to building on our early success. New education students are now required to purchase Chalk & Wire accounts when they enroll in an introductory course. All students regularly add artifacts to their eportfolio accounts and reflect on their academic subjects as well as their teaching assignments.

Reports help to drive improvements

Chalk & Wire has allowed us to create an assessment culture focused on the continuous collection of student work samples and associated data sets. Having this information available at a moment’s notice allows us to easily drill down into our data, using any parameters we wish and generate any type of report we want. We can now look at multiple assessment results and multiple student cohorts and compare them to see if there are any correlations.

Each department takes reports from their undergraduate and graduate programs and on individual students to their committee meetings. They can tell if they are weak or strong in a specific area of content and adjust their curriculum accordingly. Numerous changes have been made due to this information, in terms of content trends or what courses we are going to offer during what parts of the year. Our programs are radically different than they were four years ago - not in terms of the courses we offer, but in how we address content in those courses because of the information we get from Chalk & Wire.

¹“CU Department of Education Received Continuing National Accreditation,” http://www.cameron.edu/media-releases-2008/ncate