Quality faculty advising is often noted as vital and critical to student success. However, most institutions are not assessing the quality of faculty advising. In fact, when faculty advising is assessed it is often limited, including only quantitative surveys of student satisfaction. Moreover, when assessment occurs it is not typically intended to improve faculty advising and it is not typically used in formal reviews of faculty performance (e.g., tenure). Meaningful and comprehensive assessment is key to quality advising that supports student success. This brief review of the research literature on assessment of faculty advising, identified areas for improvement in practice and policy. Institutions of higher education, professional associations, unions, and accrediting bodies all play a role in improving and/or maintaining quality faculty advising through setting expectations for advising and outlining best practice for assessment.
[Read the rest of this article...]
Say “assessment” to most people and they think it’s like taking cough syrup—you don’t particularly like the taste, but you know it’s good for you. As the Assessment of Advising Interest Group (AAIG) co-chairs, we’d like to change this somewhat negative view of assessment. (Those of you already on the assessment bandwagon can stop reading now.)
In tough economic times, higher education administrators are obliged to seek cost-saving measures and/or to conduct cost-benefit analyses of programs. Academic advising programs have often been the targets for such reviews. Academic advising administrators, therefore, must be prepared to respond to these challenges before they occur.
An advising portfolio provides a rich and diverse way to document advising expertise. Portfolio use is increasingly prevalent in higher education. Student portfolios are used to demonstrate that students have met the desired outcomes of a given major or program. Faculty use teaching portfolios to illustrate their mastery when they apply for promotion or tenure. Universities create portfolios for a number of purposes and audiences—such as accreditation or student recruitment. Portfolios provide flexibility; advisors can use both quantitative and qualitative measures and can customize their portfolio to fit their particular advising situation. So using a portfolio to document advising performance puts advisors in the mainstream of assessment activities which are becoming more demanding as well as more sophisticated in their call for accountability.
Good assessment/evaluation can be expanded into good research. Good research should lead to even better assessment procedures. Good assessment makes use of the best conceptual and theoretical models and the best research measures or methods. With valid and reliable measures, campus-specific questions may have national implications. A phenomenon identified on your own campus may be the cutting edge for an issue of significant importance.
It is well known that retention of every student is simply not possible. As academic advisors we understand that, for some students, transferring or stopping-out is a legitimate strategy for attaining long term personal or professional success. Yet, on many campuses, talk of retention focuses on retaining “all” students. As a result, some colleges have developed overly-broad retention strategies that disjoint campus units and ignore the role of identity in the retention of at-risk ethnic and cultural minorities. A more effective alternative is the development of a focused retention framework that utilizes assessment to identify those most at risk for early institutional departure and then seeks to develop culturally relevant programmatic interventions for their success.
One of the most innovative and beneficial programs NACADA sponsors is the Assessment and Administrators’ Institutes, held mid-winter for the purpose of congregating administrators to share ideas and programs for the enhancement of our profession. Working in small groups, administrators from all types of educational institutions discuss the nitty-gritty of advising in order to establish positive programs that will be of use in their own unique environments.
Many institutions struggle to integrate accreditation criteria for assessment with their efforts to improve and enhance programs for their students. In this climate, the interest in and need for assessment of our students’ academic advising experiences has become a major issue on our campuses.
The Assessment of Advising Interest Group became a commission in part as a consequence of the growing interest in, and awareness of, the importance in assessment of advising. This change coincided with the Commission’s national survey on the status of the assessment of advising. Although the results of this survey are currently being prepared for submission to the NACADA Journal, it might be useful to look at some of the responses to the survey question, “What could the Assessment of Advising Commission/NACADA sponsor to assist your assessment efforts?”
Many advising programs strive to connect faculty, student advising, and learning in an effort to move from “advising as class scheduling” to “advising as teaching.” Likewise, many instructional development programs assist faculty with learner-centered instructional methods that better serve our under-prepared or under-served student populations. It would seem likely that the advising and teaching strategies that better serve these students would have significant overlap (Hemwall and Trachte, 2003).
Ultimately, assessment is about understanding and improving. In this regard, the assessment process provides a systematic way through which information about student learning and program effectiveness can be obtained. Done in the collective and continuous way intended, the assessment process provides a systemic way to use that information to support improvements in student learning and the advising process. In the end, assessment is systematic, systemic, and relational; there are steps to the process; the process is intentional in the gathering of evidence to support improvement in learning and process; and all of the steps within the process are inextricably intertwined.
As America ’s ethnic and racial demographics continue to shift, not only on college campuses but throughout the nation, it is essential that administrators and practitioners prepare to effectively deliver cross-cultural services. Professionals of all ethnic and racial backgrounds need to gain multicultural awareness and multicultural competency.... The preparation we receive should require a highly collaborative and interactive self-awareness and include a racial consciousness component that allows us to gain an awareness of our their beliefs and attitudes as they pertain to multiculturalism. This exploration provides an opportunity to to check biases and stereotypes that can affect our delivery of adequate cross-cultural service. Becoming aware of our values and biases is a move toward positive orientation of multiculturalism (Sue, et. al, p. 633)..
This fall the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) adopted updated academic advising standards that require the assessment of academic advising on our campuses and specifically the development of student learning outcomes. As discussed previously, assessment is a systematic, systemic, relational process. It that begins with the identification of reasons for doing assessment and ends with reporting and acting upon the assessment results. ‘Ending’ is really a misnomer since the ‘end’ of the assessment process really represents the beginning of the next cycle of assessment!
Mentor Connection is a program in which students on academic probation work closely with a graduate assistant mentor who helps the students strategize for class success and monitors their progress throughout the semester. The program is housed in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences’ undergraduate advising center at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Gambling on academic advising success? Using the balanced scorecard approach could lead to advising windfalls.... Development of a BSC begins with a clearly stated mission or purpose, measurable objectives and strategies to meet those objectives. Then under each perspective, specific outcomes are identified for each strategy. For example, if one of our strategies is to utilize faculty advisors, then a desired outcome might be the development of faculty’s advising skills.
One acronym strikes fear into many in the south-QEP. The QEP or Quality Enhancement Plan is a requirement for reaffirmation of accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). This is how one college, with NACADA 's help, survived and thrived during its QEP journey.
As greater numbers of students enter our institutions, retention and ethical service to these students become even larger issues. Bradburn (2002) indicates that approximately one-third of entering students leave our institutions without a credential; these numbers are even higher for minority (Hodge & Pickron, 2004) and community college students (ACT, 2005). Although current scholarship (Lotkowski, et al. 2005) on academic retention shows that a relationship with an academic advisor helps to increase retention, many students do not take advantage of this resource.
In the fall of 2006, I boldly went where no other “non-faculty” academic advisor at Seward County Community College had gone before; I joined the teaching scholar learning community. Why? One word: CURIOSITY. I wanted to test the catchy academic advising slogan, Advising is Teaching. I kept asking myself, if advising is teaching, then what links the two domains? What tools can we use to showcase these similarities? And how do we obtain buy-in from all stakeholders, especially students? As an academic advisor and a teaching scholar participant, I made it my charge to find this essential element.
Is it time for a ‘program review’ of your academic advising unit? Would an evaluation by external reviewers be just what is needed to jump-start significant changes in an advising program? A fresh perspective on the situations we see day-in and day-out can help us assess practical matters such as routine processes, forms, procedures, staffing, and physical arrangements. An external review can help us more closely align our efforts with institutional strategic plans and provide the evidence needed for additional resource allocation.
Weaver (2002) noted that “almost a third of America's teachers leave the profession sometime during their first three years of teaching, and almost half leave after five years.” A plethora of information is available regarding what can be done to promote retention after the new teacher is employed. To increase the probability of remaining in the teaching field, can this teacher dropout problem be addressed at the college level? What issues are involved? What can advisors of education majors do to help address this problem?
For academic advising programs to be an effective asset to support student development, persistence, and retention initiatives, institutions must create comprehensive assessment plans that are strategically focused in assessment. The NACADA Assessment Institute provides many opportunities that can help align strategies for developing, implementing, maintaining, and coining best practices in assessment in academic advising.
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 author finds that the use of collaborative note writing changes the one directional aspect of advising notes while staying true to the original purpose.
The author describes her experience at the 2017 NACADA Assessment Institute.
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 authors finds that a NACADA institute “is nothing like an annual or regional conference.”
The author discusses how she benefited from the Assessment Institute: learning the curriculum, being guided by faculty members, and networking with like-minded colleagues from across the country and abroad.
Over time, academic advisors may begin to experience emotional, physical, and spiritual exhaustion from constantly witnessing and absorbing the difficulties of students. Developing self-care strategies within advising training and development can help advisors pay attention to their emotional state and allow time for reflection and healing.
Application of a strengths model to academic advising can focus on students applying their talents and strengths to academic courses, study techniques, and major exploration.
The author is “better equipped with effective tools and resources to enhance the academic advising experience” following her attendance at the 2018 NACADA Assessment Institute.
Assessment fosters a shared consensus and culture within the campus community about the purpose of advising. By attending the Assessment Institute, advisors better understand ways to demonstrate direct connections to the priorities and mission of the academy.
As a scholarship recipient for the 2019 NACADA Assessment Institute, the author gained new, applicable knowledge, and her team made great progress in identifying next steps for their assessment work during their time at the Institute.
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 Education and Professional Studies (CEPS) at the University of West Florida adopted a centralized advising model, restructuring how academic advising services were provided to students. This article extends the story by highlighting key considerations resulting from the inception of the advising center.
Assessment provides an opportunity to take a critical look at advising programs through the lens of continuous improvement and driven by data.
The author always been drawn to conversations related to continuous improvement, outcomes, and focusing on how data can help inform decisions and drive the story advisors tell about their work. The NACADA Assessment Institute proved to be a perfect fit for learning more about academic advising assessment.
Learning how to create a good assessment plan makes sense when you consider the potential for assessment to improve academic advising practices.
