The coolest advising Study ever

What if... instead of just understanding the skills and strategies of students that foster success, we could also identify the most effective skills and strategies of those working with them?

You've got two advisors - let's call them Ross and Charles. Both are advising about ~300 students, and they stay with those students over time. So, if at the end of the first year, Ross's students have a 68% retention rate and Charles's have an 84% retention rate, the question arises: What did Ross and Charles do differently?

The importance of advising to holistic student success

Addressing all the factors that can affect student success is difficult. Some of those things, such as time management or engaging in the classroom, are real student-level factors. By that, I mean the onus of improvement falls largely on the student. If they don't develop the skills and strategies needed, there's not a lot we can do to help them.

Other things are not the purview of the student at all. If a student lacks self-efficacy, then I'm not going to give them a video and say, "now you go be more confident." Rather, that information is valuable for the institution as a whole - particularly those working directly with that student - to determine the best path forward to support and guide that student to develop self-efficacy (see Margolis & McCabe, 2004).

"Advising" is critically important in this space for two reasons. First, there are still some other factors that fall in between the student and the institution. Things like goal commitment require an interactive conversation between the student and a guide to best identify the student's goals, match them to a path, and show the way forward. Second, advisors can help the student distinguish between those things that are the student's responsibility, those that the institution should focus on, and those interactive factors in between.

You may have caught those quotation marks at the beginning of the last paragraph. I put advising in quotes because that word means very different things when going from one campus to another. In some cases, advising is the perfect place for this work, because advising has the mission, strategies, and resources to conduct this type of work. At other schools - most notably walk-in advising models - advising is not a good home for this. Here, advising is meant to help students address direct enrollment challenges: choosing a major, scheduling classes, figuring out financial aid.

These issues are important, and while I'm certain that most individuals in these roles truly care about student success and wish they had the time to work with students more, that's not the meaning of the word "advising" on their campus.

For years, when working with schools, we've tried to either (a) transform advising into something that is a good place for holistic support, or (b) identify other resources (typically someone with the title of "coach" or "counselor") that can do this work.

I've been talking a lot recently about the fundamentals of holistic student success. The recent Pain Points post is a good example of this. One of the things that is not necessarily fundamental - but sure helps - is a quality mechanism of student support. They can be an advisor, coach, counselor, or even a faculty member, but the most important thing is that at some point, someone is sitting down with the student to talk with them about their overall success in college. That's the hardest space to create, both from our side and our partners' perspectives as well.

A most helpful framework

Over the last several decades, through research into noncognitive skills, we've learned a lot about the skills, strategies, and mindsets that generally foster student success. But just as we know the importance of quality educators in fostering learning, we must also acknowledge the importance of quality advisors, coaches, and counselors to fostering student success. And yet, we've studied teaching as a professional practice for decades. We've identified effective techniques, built training around them, and shared them across institutions. Advising has rarely been treated with the same rigor. This study starts from the premise that it should be.

Over the last few years, the SSIPP model put forth by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) has been remarkably helpful in framing our work in advising. SSIPP stands for Sustained, Strategic, Integrated, Proactive, and Personalized support. In my conversations with CCRC (including interviewing one of the framework's authors for an episode of our podcast), they've made it clear that they're on the same page about the word advising - on some campuses, that might be the right term, but not everywhere. This is important because the SSIPP model sets a standard for what support should be, regardless of what your advising model currently looks like.

If you peruse the CCRC website beyond the initial report, you can find a host of materials, including some different checklists and frameworks for how SSIPP might be embodied on college campuses. This past summer, based on some of these resources, we created a survey that aligns to these domains, identifying key behaviors before, during, and after advising appointments.

The study is starting to form

Finding a framework and mechanism for assessing advising practices was just the first part of the study. The second part was finding a fitting context to conduct it. Fortunately, one of our partners was not only the perfect setting, but an eager and collaborative partner. I'll be sharing more about this study throughout the fall (including naming the partner once I've cleared it with them).

Here's the pitch: we start with this framework and survey. It represents the things that, according to the SSIPP model, are promising practices for holistic student support. The next step was to get senior administration on board. Fortunately, at our partner institution, both the advising director, the advising senior staff, and the leadership overseeing advising were keenly interested to explore these questions.

This is because they were a few years in to a complete advising redesign. All undergraduate advising was moved under one academic advising office. Advisors have a moderate ratio of about 300 students each. What's more, because of the size of the institution, we have enough advisors to observe some variance in both behaviors and outcomes. There's one other feature of their advising model that makes this a good fit: advisors stay with students throughout their career. They aren't just first-year advisors. While advisors are affiliated with academic departments, they're housed in the advising center. So, sure, students may switch advisors if their interests change or there isn't a good interpersonal fit, but it's about as nested a model as we can ask for.

There's one other thing that's really important when considering the human resource side of this equation: we've been incredibly honest about the process, purpose, and goals of this effort. We've let advisors know that this survey is aspirational. We don't know if the institution has provided the training and resources to do all the things that SSIPP suggests, so it's quite possible that some of these behaviors aren't taking place. But most importantly, we've made it clear that this isn't about evaluating individuals. It's about identifying best practices, learning how and why they work, and then disseminating those practices so that advisors can learn from one another.

And it seems to have worked! So far, everyone involved has expressed interest and even excitement about this effort, and we've received no inkling that some folks might feel threatened by the results.

What's next?

With this type of framework in place, the possibilities are tantalizing.

The first goal is to identify and disseminate broad best practices. Of course, there will be controls for student characteristics, but ultimately, the goal is to isolate what advising practices have the biggest impact on student success.

Think of these as "standards" or simply fodder for advisor training. Ultimately, though, we will be able to examine the interaction between student and advisor characteristics. What are the advising practices that work best for first-generation students, or students with low sense of belonging? Can we possibly match advisors (based on their strengths and strategies) with students (based on their academic, noncognitive, and other characteristics) to maximize fit for student success? As I said... limitless.

But let's focus on the here and now. Over the next few months, I'll be posting regular updates - via this blog and our new The Students We Have newsletter - on the overall design and initial results of this study. I really can't contain my excitement, and I hope you'll follow along to see what we learn.