It seems everybody is beginning to look more at assessment of
programs in recent years. With advisement, start by defining what you
believe the goals of advisement are supposed to be and what type of
advising you are talking about.
Here we distinguish between academic advising (what courses do I need
to take to graduate? can I substitute this course for that one? etc.)
and more career/professional advising (what area of psychology should
I go into if I want to ___? Should I go for a PhD, PsyD, or a masters
program?) There is some overlap between the two, but they address the
questions from students from different perspectives. Academic
advising is handled by a staff member in the department and advisors
at the college level. Career/professional advising is handled by
faculty who are not always aware of the exact details required for
graduation (e.g., how many hours of electives outside of psychology
are needed, how many hours would double-majoring add to my degree
plan, etc.) This distinction has also assisted us with the huge
demand for advising we have (about 1300 majors, most of which have
mainly academic advising questions.) We actually made this change in
response to some initial assessment of attitudes towards advising
when we discovered many students were looking for academic
information that the faculty members couldn't readily provide since
non-psychology degree requirements would change from catalog year to
catalog year. By more clearly defining the goals of each type of
advisement, we could then start fine tuning the assessment by looking
at questions such as do students who receive regular academic
advising graduate faster? What effects does academic advising have on
the number of non-required electives taken? For career/professional
advising we can look at the acceptance rate to 1st and 2nd choice
programs and job placement rates for those choosing not to pursue
graduate work. What percentage of those who receive career advising
choose to pursue graduate work versus those that do not receive
regular career advising? There are hundreds of different objective
criteria that can start to come out once you begin defining what it
is you hope advising will achieve. It can seem overwhelming at first,
so you have to begin by breaking it down into smaller more manageable pieces.
Also, we do not require any advising of students. We provide the
resources, but it is up to the students to take advantage of them.
For assessment purposes this actually helps us out a bit because we
have the two extremes (students who stop by a few times every
semester and students that are never advised) with most students
falling somewhere in between. (Believe me I've hard arguments on
whether we should or should not require advising several times, but
no strong evidence so far about what outcome there is from it....
hopefully as we get further along in our assessment of advising,
we'll be able to provide some data to help answer that question.)
I will say that since we split the advising into the two approaches
(academic vs career) it seems that there is greater student
satisfaction with advising. They go for the advising that gives them
the answer to their question, so they leave more satisfied... even if
they don't always like the answer they get.
We do our assessment as part of a senior survey which is required of
students enrolled in our capstone course, which is supposed to be the
(or at least one of the) last psychology courses to be taken. It is
actually integrated in as a requirement of the course, so we are able
to capture feedback from most of our students this way. We are
currently looking at other ways of getting the information from our
graduating seniors, but it is a challenge with a large percentage of
commuter students who are on campus for classes and then off to work
30-45+ miles away.
Good luck to everyone in their assessment efforts...
- marc
At 02:11 PM 1/23/2006, Horton, Joseph J. wrote:
We are discussion these issues as well. So I too would be interested
in how this might be measured. We would like to be able to measure
quality of advisement apart from student satisfaction as well.
=============================================
G. Marc Turner, PhD, MEd, Network+, MCP
Lecturer & Technology Coordinator
Department of Psychology
Texas State University-San Marcos
San Marcos, TX 78666
phone: (512)245-2526
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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