In the United Kingdom, we lack a national organization devoted to those interested in Personal Tutoring and the field remains fragmented, although there is a core group of active researchers and practitioners in the area. I think we have much to learn from you, and I hope that we also have something of value to share.
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As the nation continues down a turbulent financial path, we will undoubtedly be called upon to justify our advising programs and the impact our programs have on student success and student persistence. We have shown, and we can continue to show, the tremendous impact academic advising has on all aspects of the student experience.
As academic advisors we interact with the entire campus community to communicate possibilities to students as they identify patterns and phenomenon that explain the world. But the majority of advisors never venture beyond this state of hypothesis to validate their knowledge, share it with other advisors, or use it to inform practice. Why?
To ascertain what our millennial students wanted and needed from academic advisors, we designed a twenty-three item questionnaire that first-year students completed ...The survey results reflect how our students’ needs and approaches compare with those of typical millennial students and suggest areas for change in our present advising practices.
This informal study shows the potential for examining the academic language advisors, faculty, and staff use in communication with students...[and] serves as an example of how advisors can do quick, informal studies on topics that affect their advising practice and make a difference to the success of our students.
This article discusses an analytical approach to the collection and analysis of data in academic advising and provides examples of the use of quantitative data within advising practice at International Christian University (ICU).
Advisors have the freedom to choose to be at one of four levels within our discipline: advising practitioner, emerging professional, advising professional, or advising scholar.
Given the current lack of research on the academic advising field and profession, if advisors do not pick up the banner, what are the implications? The authors offer suggestions on how to get started with research in advising.
Academic advising is crucial if institutions are to achieve goals of persistence and timely graduation, as well as student self-realization and growth. It is one of the two most important levers to pull within the university to positively impact student success… As institutions look to academic advisors for leadership, members of the profession need to be able to articulate their value, assess their impact, and embrace the changes required to serve students better.
The authors discuss an initiative developed to fill a gap in professional development opportunities available to the academic advisors at their institution.
Implementing a successful outcomes assessment plan, particularly one that assesses learning and performance across campus units, is a big undertaking. The authors consider ten essential, intangible elements of any successful outcomes assessment endeavor.
The author contends that gathering data for outcomes assessment or research does not have to be complicated, mysterious, or difficult.
The authors contend that it is important to provide high quality online advising services that allow for comprehensive, face-to-face interactions with students, even when those students are off campus. With limited resources and demands on time, it is also critical to design an online advising option that is sustainable long-term.
This article aims to show that when communication improves across silos, or separate entities on college campuses that rarely interact, it might increase empathy for the student-athletes and facilitate simple programmatic changes that could increase the likelihood of student-athletes successfully completing the degree programs that they would ideally like to pursue.
The HLC Academy for Student Persistence and Completion at Marshall University created the MU EDGE mentoring program to pair experienced faculty mentors with incoming “murky middle” freshmen to find out what Marshall can do to better retain this under-served population through more intrusive advising.
The author advocates for increasing professional development opportunities related to study abroad.
The authors finds that a NACADA institute “is nothing like an annual or regional conference.”
In August 2017, the field of academic advising lost a champion with the passing of recent NACADA Journal co-editor Leigh S. Shaffer. Leigh, a recognized scholar in his field of social psychology, authored or co-authored 11 peer-reviewed articles for the NACADA Journal, more than any other author in the Journal’s history.
Most major academic advising theories stress the importance of the advising relationship. In advising, the quality of the relationship between advisor and student is at the heart of most interventions. The author notes that the shared focus of various advising theories on factors that foster the advisor-student relationship is very similar to the common factors theory in psychology.
As a primary point of contact between universities and students, academic advisors are often asked to integrate data-driven tools into their practice but only rarely do the concerns of advisors guide the creation of new approaches to institutional data. By bringing the advising perspective to analyses of student data, new opportunities can be found to support student pathways with helpful information.
Faculty members fill many roles at the institution, but while they are experts in their field of study, they typically receive little training or preparation to serve as mentor, coach, or advisor to students. A team of primary-role advisors and advising administrators at Penn State developed a foundational on-line course designed to help the faculty advisor understand the advising role.
The authors contend that with the increasing focus on data-driven decision making, advisors must strengthen their scholarly backgrounds to effectively engage in the administrative landscape and ensure advising efficacy and support.
When academic advisors collaborate with institutional research professionals on their campuses for such an endeavor, it is important to move beyond the data which is readily available to institutional researchers to find sufficient data points for academic advisors to determine where to focus their student mentoring efforts.
With the student at the center of The University of Texas at Tyler’s efforts, Persistence and Retention Teams have been implemented to streamline employee communication to diminish the silo effect and find resolutions to student issues as efficiently as possible.
Scholarly production and practice-sharing can be a great challenge for advising practitioner-scholars as the demands of advising practice far outweigh the time available for developing research ideas and writing for the purpose of disseminating best practices to the field. Connection with others in the field can also be a barrier. The NACADA Virtual Idea Development Group is one writing support endeavor within the overall NACADA Writing Group initiative that seeks to develop and nurture academic writing skills.
Two of the greatest barriers to implementing high-quality early intervention programs are the challenges of generating faculty buy-in and determining a reliable set of predictors. Advisors may be uniquely qualified to serve as intervention agents due to the relationships they form with students, often beginning at orientation.
Academic advisors frequently receive and analyze the important statistics of retention and graduation rates, but do not always have the time, space, or familiarity with a pathway for investigating their own practice to understand how they, in their advising practice, contribute to the story of how and why those numbers have come to be. Practitioner inquiry can produce deep knowledge of on-the-ground daily work as advisors that can help better serve students.
The author suggests the time has come to shift academic advising practices from a Millennial framework to a Generation Z (Gen Z) approach.
