Facilitating Master's Student Success: A Quantitative Examination of Student Perspectives on Advising

• Main Author: Drummond Hays, Sarah Brooks
• Format: Others
• Published: PDXScholar 2013
• Subjects: Graduate students > Counseling of; Academic achievement; Teacher participation in educational counseling; Counseling in higher education; Mentoring in education; Higher Education; Student Counseling and Personnel Services
• Online Access: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/1518; https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2502&context=open_access_etds

Faculty advising is crucial for student success, but little is known about the specific relationship between advising and master's students' success. Given that master's student enrollment is growing and diversifying, examining the relationships between advising and success is imperative for institutional efficiency and educational excellence. This quantitative study investigated nearly 1,000 master's students' experiences with two primary types of advising--administrative and mentoring. The study looked for correlations with multiple proxies of student success (e.g., graduation, retention, institutional commitment, and GPA). As well, other potentially influential individual, educational, and organizational variables (e.g., background characteristics, peer culture, and department climate) were examined for their effect on the relationship between advising and success. Results indicate that student satisfaction with advising is correlated with success. In particular, student satisfaction with administrative advising, which communicates accurate policies and helps students form educational plans, increased student success. Student satisfaction with mentoring advising, which emphasizes individualized professional support (e.g., feedback on thesis writing) was also shown to facilitate master's student success. Recommendations highlight the importance of creating degree maps and electronic degree tracking as a form of administrative advising support for students and the importance of having nurturing multiple faculty-student contacts within the department to build collegial rapport and mentoring relationships.