Handbook on Student Development

Advising, Career Development, and Field Placement

Mark E. Ware, Richard J. Millard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135832636
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Because this book's main objective is to foster and promote student development, it should appeal to those who advise, counsel, and teach undergraduate and graduate students, particularly those in psychology, education, and other social sciences. Along with a plethora of stimulating ideas for practice and research, the book contains the results of research having immediate applications to students' educational and career direction needs.

Readers will find more than 90 articles in this book distributed across three significant challenges to students' development: the academic, occupational, and personal. Further, the material presented has been organized around three distinct approaches to these challenges: advising, career development, and field placement activities. The source for these articles is the official journal, Teaching of Psychology, of Division Two of the American Psychological Association.

Section I

Advising

A common complaint among undergraduates is that they often feel anonymous in a college or university system that does not respond to their needs for academic and career advising. At the same time, faculty may feel over worked and/or under rewarded for their advising efforts. Nevertheless, one of the most pressing problems for many departments is to provide adequate academic and career advising for their students. Quality advising not only aids students In adapting to college life and preparing for a career, but it also helps institutions meet their goals for providing a relevant educational experience and retaining students.

The articles in this section contain pertinent information for the idiosyncrasies of advising undergraduate and graduate students. The first collection of articles provides an overview and perspectives for an advising system. Two groups of articles concentrate on factors affecting academic performance and major considerations for students interested in pursuing graduate education in psychology. The final selection of articles examines and evaluates issues confronting graduate students and their administrators.

1. Developing Strategies For Advising

This selection of articles provides a strong rationale for every department of psychology to assign a high priority to advising. The authors provide a model for an advising system and identify numerous suggestions and strategies for improving advising.

Robert Titley has served as a member of the faculty advising staff and Bonnie Titley as Director of Academic Advising at Colorado State University. They identified the “professional obligation” that psychology departments have to provide quality academic advising. They cited evidence to show that students not only need help in choosing a major but also in identifying career options so they are not confused by the familiar question, “What can you do with a degree in psychology?” The authors further demonstrated that high retention of students depends as much on good advising as it does on a sound and marketable curriculum. Finally, the Titleys provided a list of specific suggestions that should guide readers to improving faculty academic advising.

Richard Halgin and Lucille Halgin noted that there is no literature that specifically describes an effective and comprehensive advising program for a large psychology department. Their article described a system used to advise more than 800 majors at the University of Massachusetts. Their system includes compulsory “check-ups” for students at critical periods during their training, workshops on topics of wide Interest, and a resource center with a collection of Information that undergraduates most commonly seek. The program is a practical option for faculty who feel over worked by advising demands, but who want to meet their responsibilities to students.

John Kremer from Indiana-Purdue University made a disheartening discovery when he found that most students did not seek faculty or advisers’ assistance, even though 50% reported that they were experiencing serious study problems. The author elaborated on three obstacles that can account for low rates of academic advising: lack of faculty knowledge about techniques to improve student performance, time and attitude barriers between students and professors, and lack of reinforcement for professors. Kremer provided simple and effective suggestions to aid educators in overcoming those obstacles.

The use of printed materials can reach more students and enhance one on one advising. Uwe Gielen described a handbook he developed at York College. The book, which is available from the author, has an Impressive variety of material that is relevant to psychology majors. It contains information about department programs, policies, course sequences, descriptions of faculty, extracurricular activities, and application to graduate school. Advisers may want to examine the author’s book and use it as a model to develop one for their own departments.

Academic Advising: The Neglected Dimension In Designs for Undergraduate Education

Robert W. Titley and Bonnie S. Titley
Colorado State University

Quality of academic advising is of
continuing Importance, and that function
impinges upon other aspects of the program.

Psychology majors. Liberal education. Career education. Vocationalism. Needs. Expectations. Diversity Mobility Curriculum. Programs.

These were words and phrases that the professor/psychologist half of us (RWT) marked during a perusal of the “challenge” topics embedded in the call for papers for this issue of Teaching of Psychology. These words and phrases seemed to key in on the issues which have been of the most concern in my involvement with undergraduates over the past several years at Colorado State University. Facing my fourteenth year as a member of the faculty advising staff of “Preview CSU,” our summer orientation program, I was moved to add another topic: the entering freshman. Knowing that fewer than half of the incoming freshman class would complete a degree program and graduate from Colorado State, the “why?” of attrition also came to mind.

My co-author. Director of Academic Advising at CSU, observed that the topics listed were certainly not unique to psychology, but represented a number of the critical issues permeating the university at large. We agreed that one common thread running across the topics was the need for quality academic advising. So this paper is about advising, specifically the necessity of incorporating a commitment to and delivery of effective academic advising in any effort to meet the problems confronting undergraduate psychology in the 1980s.

Academic advising has both a history and a reputation. In 1841, when President Rutherford B. Hayes was a student at Kenyon College, he wrote a letter to his mother describing a new “rule” that had been adopted at Kenyon: Each student must select a faculty member who would become both an advisor and friend “in all matters” and serve as a medium of communication between the faculty and the student (Hardee, 1970). A hundred years later an educator (Maclean, 1953) alluded to both the history and reputation of advising.

Advising is a process with a long and dignified history in college and university. At the same time, involving as it often does tedious clerical work combined with hit-and-run conferences with students on curricula, it is a most cordially hated activity by the majority of college teachers…” (p. 357)

Student input will alert one to the reputation of advising Some excerpts from a 1976 student evaluation of academic advising on one campus in response to the sentence stem “Advisors are...: friends, helpful, uninformed, doing their best, working overtime, necessary, teachers, counselors, knowledgeable, a drag, problem solvers, nervous, listeners, the ones who have all your information but don’t remember your name, too busy,” (Cited in Crockett, 1978a). “Too busy’ raises the question, “Too busy doing what?” Research and teaching? Expending their time on content, designing curricula, and developing programs to match the faculty’s perception of what students need? Trying to keep the administration, legislators, and other sources of dollars believing that what we do for the students is valuable?

Faculties are not unsuccessful at such activities, nor are their efforts born of ill intentions. But beyond course content and programs, what do we convey to students about the assumed wisdom of our plan for them—or their plans for themselves? The reward hierarchy for faculty has possibly become so distorted in the hundred and forty years since President Hayes’ college days that an advisor’s “rule” in some colleges and universities might now read:

Each faculty member shall be assigned a number of undergraduate students as his or her advisees and shall, with a minimum expenditure of time, effort, and caring, answer whatever trivial questions they might have, inform them as to what courses they must take to graduate in whatever major they’ve chosen (however capricious that choice may be), and be available, if possible, to sign necessary registration forms. The faculty shall also be aware that, for themselves, advising is primarily a perfunctory clerical duty and a minor academic activity relative to teaching, research, and one’s own career development, and that there shall be little or no reward or recognition for the performance of advising activities, save for the occasionally expressed appreciation of a grateful, well-advised student

Is it conceivable that some contemporary college student might apprise his or her mother in a letter home of this “rule”? We believe some students probably already have.

Hardee (1970) summarized the history and reputation of advising in one sentence: “Faculty advising is dignified and derided, much desired but often denigrated, done well and done ill” (p. 27). The process of advising is still with us and students expect to be advised, even those who don’t want advice. Faculty, some at least, will continue to offer advising within the many systems that exist, whether their efforts are rewarded or not. Some educators claim an increase in the awareness that advising is an important and critical function in relation to both the development of curricula and the development of students, in 1979, Crockett stated:

There exists in higher education today a renewed interest in academic advising. Academic advising is recognized as an educational service to be provided by an institution of higher education. Academic advising, properly delivered, can be a powerful influence on student growth and development. It can also interpret, enhance, and enrich the educational development of any college or university, (p. 5.420)

Dressel, in his recently published book Improving Degree Programs (1980), writes:

Student advising—especially in relation to teaching and program planning—presents a series of problems and concerns that must be addressed in the curriculum and the programs derived from it are to serve their purposes in preparing students for living, learning, and working... If education is indeed to be a continuing lifelong process, the individuals who engage in it must have some sense of the significance and of the sequence to achieve desired goals. In many ways, good advising may be a more critical and a more significant academic function than teaching, (p. 250, p. 261)

Let’s be more specific and relate advising to selected areas that present a challenge to undergraduate psychology and its students in the coming decade: (a) the initial choice of major (b) retention and attrition, and (c) vocationalism.

Initial Choice of Major. Large numbers of entering freshmen continue to select psychology as their intended major. They are often unclear as to why they have chosen psychology, although there is some evidence (Titley & Vattano, 1972) that a primary source of interest in psychology is exposure to the topic in high school. In the same study it was found that entry into an applied human service delivery profession was the predominant long-range career goal for the majority (61 %) of them. Another 24% were undecided or vague concerning their eventual goal. But an “aura of uncertainty or tentativeness” (p. 136) seemed to prevail when they were asked, “Should you stay in psychology, what is your goal or what do you see yourself doing someday?” A four-month followup confirmed the tenuousness of both major choice and goal. Many, when asked again about their goal, could not recall accurately what they had told the interviewer four months earlier, and several had changed their minds in the interim. After just one year of college, over one-third had changed majors, transferred, or dropped out of school.

In a second followup conducted four and a half years later (Titley & Vattano, 1976) fewer than one-fourth of the original group had completed the degree in psychology, with the remainder having changed majors, withdrawn from college in good standing, transferred to other schools, or left school because of academic difficulties, and none had entered graduate study in psychology. We concluded that for entering freshmen declaring psychology, their choice tended to be tenuous, tentative, unstable and unenduring. While one could ask whether our program matched their abilities, needs, and expectations, it could also be concluded that these students might have benefited from better academic advising.

The authors are near the final stages of another longitudinal Study on major choice and major change among undergraduates across all majors at CSU. Some preliminary findings (Titley & Titley, 1980) are worth reporting here. Struck by the high rate of major changing among undergraduates, we are following the major selections and degree progress of 2,451 students who attended our summer orientation program in 1977. After the initial shifting of major selection had occurred (that always occurs) between application to the university and orientation, 942 or about 38% had declared an “undecided” category or had already changed their minds at least once between application and initial contact with the orientation and registration procedure. The remaining 62% were considered the most “decided” behaviorally as a result of having stayed with their original choice during the same period.

Using a self-report measure of “certainty” about choice of major, these 1,509 “decided” freshmen were classed into three categories—“low certainty,” “tentative,” and “high certainty.” It was found in a two-year followup that even among those who had selected a specific major while still in high school, stayed with that choice through the summer, registered for classes in that same major, and who felt “certain” about their choice, there was a fair proportion (17%) who had made a change during the first two years at the university. Among those who had indicated uncertainty or tentativeness about their choice, over one-third had shifted to another major by the end of their second year. Apparently it is not only the “undecided” who are undecided, and our findings dovetail with the results of a recent study at Brigham Young University (Goodson, 1981) which revealed that students with declared specific majors need as much help with career choice and career development as those who are officially in an “undecided” category.

In another few months we will have data on these students at the fifth year point since matriculation. Yet, noting their status after two years, it becomes obvious that we cannot assume that because a student selects a major, his or her major or career choice has crystallized. We believe that colleges and universities are not operating in a manner which fully recognizes the developmental qualities in students and the pressures they are experiencing with respect to choosing a major. These pressures include parental expectations, information from college catalogs which imply that one ought to be a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I: Advising
• Section II. Career Development
• Section III: Field Placement
• Subject index
• Appendix