Setting the Frame: Standards of Accreditation and Evaluation
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Editor's note: This presentation was prepared for the 2025 ATS Student Data and Resources Consultation (Pittsburgh, PA, April 3-4). Summary and transcript below have been edited for clarity.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The 2020 ATS Standards are principle-based: theological education is rooted in theological values that vary across schools, so the Standards are deliberately brief and ask each school to articulate its own approach in line with its mission and context.
Standard 3—Student Learning and Formation—sits at the center of the ten-area framework and applies to all degree programs; Standards 4 and 5 then address specific degrees.
Schools must define formation themselves (spiritual, vocational, intellectual, human)—there is no single prescriptive definition, but a school is expected to define it, measure it, and be curious about whether it is achieving it.
Formation runs across the Standards, not just in degree programs: planning and evaluation (Standard 2), the research doctorate's (PhD/ThD) preparation to form others (Standard 5.14), the library's role (Standard 6.6), student services (Standard 7.5), and faculty (Standard 8).
Effective evaluation combines direct + indirect measures and qualitative + quantitative data, supported by curricular maps, rubrics, and benchmarks; ATS provides reflective guides, the self-study handbook, and additional guidelines (e.g., competency-based theological education, global awareness) as resources.
KEY QUOTES
"Each school should define these terms in ways that best fit its mission and religious context… There may be common approaches, but not one prescriptive way that formation—spiritual, vocational, intellectual, human—is expected to be defined. A school is expected to define it, to measure it, to be curious about whether it is achieving it."
"All that an institution does, it should be curious about whether it is doing well."
"[Visiting teams and the Board of Commissioners] are looking for a number of different types of data, not just one type—a range of data that adequately addresses, for a school in its context, how it knows how it's doing."
TRANSCRIPT
§ Opening
Greetings, everybody. I'm Heather Campain Hartung. I'm one of the Directors of Accreditation here at ATS, and I'm delighted to get to spend a little time with you—first by video and then in live conversation—as you gather and think about formation. I'll spend some time laying some groundwork for you in terms of thinking about formation from the standpoint of the Standards of Accreditation, and thinking about evaluation of doing that work.
Getting started here with the [presentation]: I'm going to offer quite a bit of information in these slides as a way to provide resources that you have available to you. There will be a bunch of links; we'll make sure you have this information. So we'll hit the high level here, and then I will welcome questions now or at any point in the future about this material.
§ Overview of the Standards
You will have, I'm guessing, different ranges of familiarity with the Standards of Accreditation. The Standards of ATS are created by the membership, approved by the membership, sustained by the membership; the most recent version was approved in 2020. So many of you will have worked with these at your schools.
The Standards cover ten areas that range from the specifics of the degree programs, which sit there in the middle, to broader institutional matters of mission integrity and resources. Student learning and formation sits at the center of the Standards, and that learning and formation is framed by what is needed to ensure quality. So it counts on institutional mission and integrity, on good planning and evaluation, on the support of institutional resources, and on good governance and administration. You can see in the middle that learning and formation is very closely aligned with the degree programs that are offered, the resources of the library and student services, and of course the very central work of faculty at institutions.
§ A Principle-Based Approach
This most recent version of the Standards is principle-based. That means a number of things. It means the Standards affirm that theological education is rooted in theological values. Those theological values vary across ATS schools, and so the Standards ask schools to articulate who they are and how they do what they do, in line with their own mission and context. You can see that reflected in what you might think about as the brevity of the Standards: that brevity shifts the work of explanation to the schools, to name what things look like in their own context.
If you haven't seen the Standards, I wanted to give you a quick snapshot of what they look like. This is in a form called the Standards with Self-Study Ideas. Each of the Standards has an opening paragraph that summarizes what is to follow. That paragraph introduces the topic of the Standard, the essential elements; then there are numbered statements that follow. Here you can see an example from student learning and formation, and then in the self-study idea version you see description that explicates what might be behind each of those numbered statements. You see this here talking mostly in terms of "mights," occasionally in terms of a "should." But these are ways to help schools think about how they can interpret, deploy, and name their alignment with these Standards.
§ On Standard 3: Student Learning and Formation
Looking more specifically at Standard 3: Student Learning and Formation, we can see the affirmation that theological schools are communities of faith and learning centered on student learning and formation. You can see formation here in many different places. I've outlined the three sections of Standard 3: components of student learning and formation, modalities that support it, and educational policies. Standard 3 applies to all degree programs at an institution, and then Standards 4 and 5 come in and talk about specific degree programs. So Standard 3 frames a school's approach more generally.
It's important to look here for a second at one of the self-study ideas named for Standard 3.1, which notes that each school should define these terms in ways that best fit its mission and religious context. This is simply emphasizing the point that there is not one prescriptive way. There may be common approaches, but not one prescriptive way that formation—spiritual, vocational, intellectual, human—is expected to be defined. A school is expected to define it, to measure it, to be curious about whether it is achieving it, but there is no specific way that it is defined.
§ Formation in the Degree Standards
Here's just a quick glimpse at where formation—spiritual formation, personal formation in particular—sits within the degree programs. It sits in its most explicit form within the Master of Divinity degree: Personal and spiritual formation, including development in personal faith, professional ethics, emotional maturity, moral integrity, and spirituality, is an expectation of all Master of Divinity degree programs.
You see this in much less detail in the other degree programs. For example, the Master of Arts Standard (4.9) does not define it in that amount of detail, but simply notes that evaluation in that degree program—as well as all others—needs to address learning and formation.
§ Formation Across the Standards
Formation exists across the Standards, not just in the particular degree-program Standards.
Planning and evaluation (Standard 2): Evaluation is assumed to be a simple, systematic, and sustained process that helps the school understand how well it is achieving its mission, especially regarding student learning and formation.
PhD/ThD (Standard 5.14): Students in these programs are given opportunities to develop competence in teaching and forming students. Part of what this degree program does is create folks who will form.
Library (Standard 6.6): The library has a role in enhancing student learning and formation in partnership with others throughout the institution, particularly faculty.
Student services (Standard 7.5): Support services and programming—chapel, counseling services, many different things—could be part of student learning and formation.
Faculty (Standard 8): Faculty play a central role in supporting student learning and formation.
So that's a quick look at the Standards and the ways they talk about formation.
§ A Framework for Evaluation
I want to shift gears now and talk a little bit about evaluation, because all that an institution does, it should be curious about whether it is doing well. This framework is one way to look at evaluation, asking: Why do we exist? What do we do, given why we exist? What do we hope? How are things going, and how would we know? And does anything need to change?
If we think about the work of self-study, for example—that a school will be engaged in every ten or perhaps seven or five years in a very formal way—the assumption is that ongoing curiosity about how things are going is part of the school's practice, and that spiritual formation fits within this. These are the kind of questions that we invite schools to bring to the table to do that work, from the classroom level to the program level to the full institutional level.
I mentioned Standard 2.6, where formation sits for Standard 2—and there is more information about the kind of work that is involved in evaluation. It's about knowing outcomes. It's about gathering evidence. It's about thinking: who are the stakeholders who have information, who have insight into doing that analysis and evaluation? And then thinking, if we can improve here, how are we going to improve? What does that look like? We often talk about that as closing the loop. We think about the process of evaluation itself as identifying goals or outcomes, figuring out what information is needed to achieve those, interpreting that, and then implementing those changes.
§ Terminology
Let me talk next about some terminology, which may be helpful as you think about the kind of measurement that may be possible in the topic of your conversations today and tomorrow.
Student learning outcomes / program learning outcomes are related to degree programs, and they articulate what schools want students to know, to do, to be, to feel. So this is about what a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree, for example, promises to students; what a Master of Arts (MA) degree promises to students.
Institutional goals hopefully have some relationship to that, but they're even broader. So it might be things like graduation rates, retention rates, admissions targets, workforce diversity. All of these are the kind of things that schools will tend to along the way and then summarize in the work of self-study.
Visiting teams and the Board of Commissioners, as they accompany schools through the process of evaluation, are looking for a number of different types of data—not just one type, but a range of data that adequately addresses, for a school in its context, how it knows how it's doing.
Direct measures are things that measure performance. This might be a summary of a supervised ministry experience, the result of a capstone project, or a thesis.
Indirect measures, on the other hand, are things that measure student perception. So asking a student how they felt about their depth of knowledge in subject X at the beginning of their time and at the end—or how they felt about their formation at the beginning and at the end.
Qualitative data describes something with qualities or characteristics, probably in narrative form. This could be from a focus group or a survey.
Quantitative data is something that can be counted or compared. So you might say seven out of ten students scored at the excellent level on a rubric for a particular kind of assignment.
Think about how to put all of those types of data into play to make sure you have a good sense of what you are measuring.
§ Tools for Evaluation
When we are talking to schools about doing the work of self-study and the ongoing work of evaluation, there are lots of different ways to gather evidence about programs and about the institution as a whole. They range from course evaluations to larger financial measures and satisfaction surveys—and you can see the Entering Student Questionnaire (ESQ) and Graduating Student Questionnaire (GSQ) there as a primary resource. I think continuing to think about how those questions and those surveys of students might serve schools well in doing their overall evaluation work is really needed and important work.
There are lots of ways to think about interpretive tools—many of you will be familiar with many of these:
Curricular maps tie particular courses to the program learning outcomes. Let's say you have a program learning outcome and you don't see any courses that address it: that would identify a need to make a tweak in the curriculum. Or alternately, you have a course that does not seem to serve any of your program or student learning outcomes; that might be okay if it's an [elective], but if it's a required course, you might ask why that course fits in your curriculum. Curricular maps can help you think through that.
Rubrics can be used in all sorts of ways—from scoring individual assignments, to allowing a group of faculty to score an artifact and figure out whether it is achieving a particular assignment, or whether a particular course is achieving what was hoped for in that course's contribution to the program learning outcome.
Benchmarks: it's always important to think about what benchmarks are. What percent of your students do you want to receive [a certain score]? What kind of increase do you want in deepening their sense of spiritual development over time? What percent of students do you want to achieve mastery or a certain kind of competence in a particular area? Inviting conversation about how the tools you develop feed into the analysis is quite important.
§ Resources
I'm going to close by simply pointing to a handful of resources. You will have this information, and you will undoubtedly have additional resources to share among yourselves—that's fantastic.
Books that, as I poll my accrediting colleagues, they are finding have been quite helpful over time:
Measures of Religiosity—a little bit of an older text, but one that includes a bunch of ways of measuring that can be helpful for schools.
Two resources from the Roman Catholic tradition that talk about priestly formation and the work of a Catholic priest. Though specific to a community, they have the ability to inform this work among a broader audience.
On the ATS website:
A Reflective Guide to Effective Evaluation for Theological Schools—bring formation and the evaluation of formation to that guide and read through it; you'll find some help there.
Self-Study Handbook—guides that process more generally.
The Standards of Accreditation and the Standards-with-self-study-ideas, plus additional resources for assessment coordinators. A great place to dip in for resources if you want to have a conversation at your institution or across institutions.
Additional formal guidelines approved and reviewed by the Board of Commissioners:
Guidelines on competency-based theological education—relatively recently updated in the last nine months, so worth taking a look.
Guidelines for global awareness and engagement—these absolutely could intersect with the work of formation.
§ Closing
So those are the things I have to bring to you today—just providing a little bit of structure, a little bit of context and background as you do your work. I again wish you well in the conversations that are ahead, and will very much look forward to being in conversation with you.
DESCRIPTION: Remarks by Heather Campain Hartung, erstwhile Director of Accreditation (current ATS Senior Director of Programs and Initiatives), recorded for the 2025 ATS Student Data and Resources Consultation. Hartung outlines how the principle-based Standards of Accreditation center student learning and formation to indicate quality in graduate theological education. Her presentation offers a shared framework for the 2025 Consultation by defining key terms, practices, and resources that reveal how formational theological education is articulated, evaluated, and documented, as formation expectations tie directly to institutional culture, assessment strategies, and peer accountability. By attending to the ATS Standards, member schools demonstrate quality and integrity across diverse institutional missions, contexts, and traditions.
KEYWORDS: open access / free access; theological education; ATS Student Data and Resources Consultation (2025); presentation (transcribed); ATS Standards of Accreditation (2020); Commission on Accrediting of ATS (COAATS); ATS Board of Commissioners; quality assurance; planning, evaluation, and educational assessment; slide deck
CITATION: Hartung, Heather Campain. 2025. "Setting the Frame: Standards of Accreditation and Evaluation." Presentation, 2025 ATS Student Data and Resources Consultation, Pittsburgh, PA, April 3. https://www.atsformationrepository.org/resources/setting-the-frame-standards-of-accreditation-and-evaluation.
