Freshman/Sophomore Advising and Curricular Coherence

Purpose

Studies of the academic advising system at the College of William and Mary concluded with the unfortunate statistic that most students met with their advisers only once during their first two years. Consequently, students had great latitude in selecting their own courses and their choices did not correspond to the faculty's view of a coherent liberal education. With FIPSE support, a new advising system was created to meet the need for greater intellectual coherence in undergraduates' academic programs. Its design drew on the experience of successful advising models elsewhere and on findings of the state-mandated student-outcome assessment project.

Innovative Features

The new advising system is built on faculty volunteers who each have 12 to 15 freshman advisees. At any given time, about a third of all faculty members are involved in freshman-sophomore advising. Advisers receive copious information on their advisees, compiled in part from an extensive "General Education Profile" survey conducted by the academic advising office in the summer before students enter college. The survey asks questions about students' background and experience, intellectual interests, knowledge, strengths and weaknesses in general education, academic plans, oral communication skills, and attitudes and values. Three meetings with advisers are now mandatory during the freshman year-the registrar's computers do not allow freshmen to register if they have not first met with their advisers in the two weeks preceding the registration period. Advisers have electronic access to student academic records and demographic data, and the pool of information available to advisers is constantly growing.

To satisfy the new advising expectations, faculty needed proper training. A variety of methods were used to train advisers, such as large meetings to discuss Internet access tools recently made available by the registrar and, the most helpful to faculty, focus sessions devoted to particular advising topics.

A database of curricular histories was created, comprised of six consecutive graduating classes. Findings from this database influenced advising practices in interesting ways. For example, analyses of course-taking profiles revealed that science majors took more of their general education courses later in their college careers than did humanities or social science majors. As a result, upper-division advisers in science concentrations became more involved in discussing general education issues with their advisees. Other studies showed that indecisiveness about majors and career paths was often tied to other problems, and students who showed extreme indecisiveness were referred to the Career Services Office for special attention and counseling, in the hope of adding coherence and structure to their academic planning.

Evaluation and Project Impact

Peter Ewell, a nationally recognized expert in assessment, served as the project's external evaluator in its final stages. In his report, he wrote:

Several features of the project's design are noteworthy and helped account for the project's success. First, it strongly reasserted the original (and often lost) mentorship role of advisement by making it a significant adjunct to instruction. Rather than discharging a purely informational function in helping students to understand curricular requirements and how to act them out, advisers, in the best cases, became tutors-actively shaping student understanding of the connection between courses and their own path of development. Second, the effort was profoundly empirical. The initial student descriptive questionnaire was a particular success in building an initial profile of individual student strengths, weaknesses, and inclinations. . . while providing opportunities for students to reflect actively on what they themselves needed to do.

Further evidence of the success of the new advising system can be seen in a major shift in faculty attitudes toward freshman-sophomore advising. Before the FIPSE project, the dean's office had such trouble finding advisers that the dean levied an advising quota on reluctant departments. Today, the quota has been abandoned because faculty actually seek advising assignments. It is not uncommon for faculty planning research leaves to reserve an advising slot for the year after their return. The college's focus on advising, coupled with special recognition for outstanding advisers and the creation of small 'professional development accounts' for faculty who advise freshmen and sophomores, has led to a plentiful supply of volunteers. Faculty reviews of the advising system and the associated student database have been positive.

Student satisfaction with the new system and with their individual advisers remains high. On anonymous surveys, students reported no interest in changing their advisers. That survey finding is confirmed by the fact that the number of students who do request a change in advisers is quite small.

As expected, the number of student-adviser meetings has risen from one in two years to three in the freshman year alone, and advisers report a growing level of continuing contact with their advisees even after the students have declared a major and moved on to an adviser in their major discipline.

Concrete evidence of changes in students' course-taking patterns due to better advising is harder to provide, in part because there has been a major change in the college's general education requirements. However, studies of two graduating classes did show a marked decrease in the numbers of special appeals by seniors who found they did not have the proper array of courses for graduation. This may be ascribed to increased levels of curricular planning resulting from the new advising system.

The project's repercussions were not limited to the advising system. The most striking evidence of its wider influence is the 1993 revision of the undergraduate curriculum. The committee reports and public discussions leading up to the final adoption of the new, more structured general education requirement were shaped by the findings of the advising project. An often-repeated statistic in the curricular debates was the project's finding that, in four consecutive graduating classes, many students had taken no courses that could be construed as involving non-Western histories or cultures, that substantial numbers of students had no science experience beyond one course, and that a majority of students had no exposure to the fine and performing arts. The new general education curriculum sought to address each of these problems.

The advising project also influenced a redesign of the college's registration system. Using technology in advising freshmen in the selection of their courses eventually led to the creation of a flexible online system to allow advisers to have quick and complete access to their advisees' records.

The project's theme of curricular coherence spread beyond general education to advising within students' majors. The college provided special grants for the creation of departmental advising handbooks, which include discussion of how the major fits together and stress the intellectual themes that run through and unify courses in the major. Today almost all departments have such handbooks, some of them available on departmental home pages.

Project Continuation

The new advising system and the new Office of Academic Advising are now fully institutionalized, having firm budget support from a special allocation from the Virginia legislature. Academic Advising was protected from subsequent rounds of budget cuts and received enhanced office space. Automated procedures were put in place to ensure easy expansion and use of the curricular history and demographic database.

In addition to the firm funding base, the project enjoys broad support among faculty and administrators. In a display of that support, the college's recent strategic plan identified continuation of the advising system as a high priority for the future and endorsed the use of academic advising as a tool to build curricular coherence in students' academic studies.

Dissemination

The project's findings were presented at three mid-Atlantic regional meetings of the National Academic Advising Association, at four meetings of the Virginia Assessment Group, and at one national meeting of the American Psychological Association. In addition, members of the project team served as consultants to other universities who were planning changes in their advising systems and general education curricula and presented talks on advising and curricular renewal at AACU and CCAS meetings. Data analyses from the project were used in reports to the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia.

Available Information

The Office of Academic Advising produces a "Course Selection Guidebook" for freshmen to help them plan for their first college semester. The guidebook provides in-depth information on course selection, freshman seminars, and courses in various liberal arts and pre-professional majors.

Information about the project and its outcomes may be obtained from:

Randolph A. Coleman
Academic Advising
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
Telephone: 757-221-2476

or

David Lutzer
Mathematics Department
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
Telephone: 757-221-4006

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