I'd like to begin by posing the seven questions I will answer and by telling you about a series of events that occurred a quarter of a century ago that strengthened the teaching-advising connection for me.
My seven questions are:
When I began my academic career, I was certain that teaching and advising were different activities. I believed that teaching consisted of giving lectures to groups of students in the classroom and then testing them to determine if they had accurately assimilated the information from my lectures and the textbook. I believed that advising consisted of meeting individually with my psychology major advisees in my office to help them choose classes for the following semester in a manner that would allow them to graduate in four years.
As the years passed, this distinction started to blur, and I began to realize that teaching and advising share a great deal in common. For example, my students who did not perform well in my classes often came to my office to seek help in improving their grades. This didn't meet my criteria for teaching because we were in my office, not the classroom, and they came alone, not in groups. But it also didn't meet my criteria for advising because they were my students, not my advisees, and they were concerned about the class in which they were currently enrolled, not about the classes they might enroll in next semester. Apparently I had stumbled into the “Twilight Zone” where teaching and advising intersect.
Although I had been taught how to teach students in graduate school, I had never been taught how to teach my students how to learn what I was teaching them. As a result, I looked at them seriously and offered them little platitudes like “Study harder,” or “Read the book more than once,” or “Study with someone else in the class.” They would leave my office, promising to follow my advice, but their grades seldom improved. My solution to this problem was to enroll in “How to Study in College,” a continuing education course offered at a local university in which I learned strategies to
Although my graduate education in memory and cognition had provided the rationale for many of these strategies (e.g., elaborative rehearsal and depth of processing), I had never heard these principles put to such valuable use in an educational context.
Upon completion of this class, I began to insert the information I learned from it into my lectures in ways that would help my students realize that a better understanding of their own cognitive processes (i.e., metacognitive skills) would enable them to learn academic material more successfully. At this point, I started to realize that the distinction between teaching and advising was neither as strong nor as valid as I had once believed. As my career continued, and I became professionally active in teaching and advising organizations, I began to understand that teachers who make this distinction may be doing so in a manner that is detrimental to their students, to their advisees, and to their own professional development.
But, do all teachers share my interest in and enthusiasm for academic advising? To answer this question, let's investigate how faculty perceive their roles as academic advisers.
1. How do faculty perceive their roles as academic advisers?
According to a series of national surveys conducted by American College Testing, faculty provide the majority of academic advising in colleges and universities (ACT, 1979, 1983, 1988). However, faculty perceptions of their advising roles are far from simple – and are often rather disturbing – as characterized by an unsettling statement on the first page of the chapter on advising written by Mark Ware that appears in Tom McGovern's Handbook for Enhancing Undergraduate Education in Psychology (1993). This statement is: “Although theory, research, and practical applications permeate the advising literature, most academic psychologists appear relatively uninterested in advising-related activities and outcomes” (p.47).
Ware provided a clue to this enigma when he cited Larsen and Brown (1986) who found that when faculty were asked to respond to statements about “the adequacy of rewards for advising, the consideration of advising when giving merit raises, and the role of advising in promotion and tenure evaluation” (p. 62), forty-eight to seventy-two percent of them disagreed strongly with these statements. Other clues to this puzzle are
It is no wonder that faculty have given academic advising such short shrift. It is an activity for which they
McGovern (1993) lent support to the last of these obstacles when he said, “Understanding developmental issues and teaching problem-solving strategies to students who differ in gender, age, ethnicity, patterns of enrollment, and prior academic and life experiences are significant challenges” (p. 222).
Titley and Titley (1982) put their tongues squarely in their cheeks and produced the following fictitious “adviser's rule,” which appears facetious on the surface, but which may unfortunately ring true for many faculty who have served as academic advisers.
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 of 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. (p. 46)
It was perceptions like these that lead MacLean (1953, p. 357) to state, “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.”
This affective juxtaposition regarding faculty perceptions of advising is echoed in the following student responses to a campus-wide advising evaluation form that asked them to complete the sentence: Advisers are __________. Their responses were: 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, and too busy (cited in Crockett, 1978). Perhaps Hardee (1970, p. 27) said it best when he stated, “Faculty advising is dignified and derided, much desired but often denigrated, done well and done ill.”
Does academic advising deserve such vilification from teachers? To begin to answer this question, let's first gain a better understanding of the linguistic relationship between the words teaching and advising.
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