Relationship of Academic Advising Satisfaction With Academic Progress at Higher Education Level

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between academic advising satisfaction and academic progress of the students at higher education level. Today, academic advising is defined as an information exchange designed to foster student‟s educational and career goals, with the burden of responsibility upon the students. With proper advising, they can vigorously continue their studies and be successful in completing their studies without least hurdle. Academic advising plays an important role in any institution and how students perceive his/her relationship with the institution and it means that if students are satisfied by the advising given to them they will retain in university and will perform better as compared to those who are not getting advising. Academic progress of the student was measure through different indicators like their GPA, successful course completion, eligibility to promote next semester, probation and readmission of the students. The major objectives of this study included; to identify the level of satisfaction of students regarding the developmental academic advice at university level; to identify the level of satisfaction of students regarding prescriptive academic advising at university level; to assess the level of academic progress of the students; to find out the relationship between developmental academic advising and academic progress of the students; to find out the relationship between prescriptive academic advice and academic progress of the students; to examine the relationship between academic advising satisfaction and students‟ academic progress. It was a quantitative study using survey methods. All the students of final semesters of 2ndyears M.A/MSc and 4th years BS degree programmes of eight social sciences departments of International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) formed the population of the study. Randomly selected 475 students were taken as a sample. The academic advising was assessed by the Academic Advising Inventory originally developed by Winston & Sander, (1984) with later version for conducting similar investigations was modified by Christian & Sprinkle, (2013) and used for data collection. The students‟ academic progress was measured by the following indicators their GPA, successful completion, and eligibility for being promoted to next semester or the probation and re-admission of the students. Data were collected through the personal visits of the researcher to all the selected departments of social sciences of IIUI. For the level of the satisfactory measurement percentage was used. The relationship between academic advice satisfaction scores with the students‟ academic progress was measured by Pearson product movement correlation. To measure the mean difference between gender and programme variations the t-test was applied. On the basis of the findings it was concluded that the students who received developmental academic advice attained higher level of satisfaction as compared to prescriptive advising style. Students formed developmental advising style as it provided advice in all matters at academic and non academic; whereas prescriptive advising style was based on the formal and distant relationship. These are two contrasting behavioral styles and attitudes perceived by the students. In the former style advisor established a warm and caring relationship for accomplishing various advising tasks, advising on the total education of the students from carrier planning to job path ways; whereas the prescriptive advising style seemed limited in content and scope. The relationship between advisor-advisee was based on the status, position and authority of the advisor.