The Faculty Advisor PDF Download

Faculty serve in a variety of capacities within the university. One of the roles commonly held by faculty members is to engage with students through advising. Likewise, since the founding of the higher education system in the United States, student organizations play an integral part in the student experience on college campuses. Although faculty play an integral role with student organizations, and student organizations comprise an important part of the higher education landscape, no advising theories surrounding student organization advising currently exist. Borrowing from academic advising literature and associated theories as a guide, two types of advising, prescriptive and developmental, may provide an initial starting point for better understanding student organization advising practices. Developmental advising first appeared in 1972 by Crookston and was later elaborated on by O'Banion (1972). In 1982, Winston and Sandor developed an instrument to measure academic advising titled the Academic Advising Inventory (AAI), which determined, on a scale, whether the advisor's approach to advising presented as more prescriptive or developmental. This study used a modified Academic Advising Inventory, the Student Organization Advising Inventory, a 55-question survey including 14 demographic-type questions that provided insight into advising preference, common advising activities, and relationships between the style of advising and the advisors' demographics. The inventory was sent via Qualtrics email to 279 faculty advisors to student organizations at a large public university. Of those who received the survey, 74 (26.5%) advisors completed it. The study found that the participants preferred developmental advising techniques and that the most reported activities reported were discussing organization business such as meeting/programming topics, getting to know each other, signing forms, identifying other campus offices that can provide assistance, discussing extracurricular activities, discussing college policies, discussing officer succession, talking about what you are doing besides taking classes, and discussing bylaws or constitution requirements. The comparison between the advising style and each of the three demographic indicators did not yield a statistically significant relationship. There was no evidence of a relationship between the preferred advising style and sex, time at institution, or type of organization advised. Implications for practice include training, recruitment, and advising approach.