Higher education institutions face a fundamental disconnect between extensive data collection and actionable understanding of student learning, a practitioner's dilemma perpetuated by fragmented institutional assessment, evaluation, and research functions. This dissertation proposes the Integrated Institutional Assessment, Evaluation, and Research (I-AER) Framework, which reconceptualizes these three functions as complementary modes of inquiry (descriptive, comparative, and explanatory) capable of generating integrated institutional intelligence when aligned around common questions, shared data, and coordinated analysis. To demonstrate the framework's practical value, it was applied to the evaluation of Open Educational Resources (OER) effectiveness within the State University of New York (SUNY) community college system. Using 12,537 course sections across seven high-enrollment general education courses at 25 community colleges from Fall 2018 through Spring 2020, propensity score matching and inverse probability weighting addressed selection bias, with treatment effects estimated through fixed-effects regression with cluster-robust standard errors. Heterogeneous treatment effects analyses examined whether OER impacts varied across instructor, course, and institutional characteristics. OER adoption was associated with statistically significant reductions in average grades (-0.19 grade points) and course completion rates (approximately -4 percentage points), with effects concentrated in face-to-face instruction. No measured moderator explained this variation. Exploratory analyses raised equity concerns, with institutions serving higher proportions of underrepresented minority students showing larger negative effects. Together, the three modes validated I-AER as a model for transforming institutional effectiveness from compliance-driven activity into evidence-driven discovery, generating both system-level insight and the localized intelligence practitioners need to act.

Keywords

I-AER framework · assessment · evaluation · research · institutional intelligence · OER