This article provides a review of the evolution of the developmental academic advising approach and a brief analysis of its relationship to the emergent contemporary approaches to academic advising.

Administrators at a large, public university launched a mandatory success course for freshmen placed on academic probation at the end of their first semester. We compared the rates of course participant and nonparticipant return to good academic standing; persistence to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years; and graduation (within 4 to 5 years). The…

In this qualitative study, we investigated the academic major and career decision-making processes of honors college students who were declared as "exploratory" students in their freshman year at a large, public, midwestern university. We used semistandardized interviews and document analysis as primary data collection methods to answer four…

We explored the effectiveness of compliance-gaining strategies on college student-athletes (N = 228) in three request situations (i.e., seeking a tutor, attending a weekly academic appointment, and faithfully attending class). The study revealed several key findings: a) Student-athletes perceive the compliance-gaining strategy of negative…

Foreclosure students have prematurely committed themselves to academic majors and future careers, but present themselves to academic advisors as very decided. From a developmental theory perspective, foreclosures represent an immature identity status and include students whose failure to explore their personal and vocational identities and achieve…

Early college high schools (ECHSs) are partnerships between high schools and colleges or universities designed to enhance college readiness and completion, particularly among students traditionally underrepresented in higher education. We compared the self-reported motivational profiles of ECHS students to traditional first-year university…

In the last year, three respected leaders in academic advising, Wes Habley, Terry Kuhn, and Gary Padak, published articles suggesting that academic advising has not met the standards of scholarship to be considered a field of inquiry, an academic discipline, or a profession. In this article, we examine academic advising history from the…

By adding student perceptions of the curriculum, we enhance the current history of American higher education over 5 decades. We draw from memoirs, short stories, notebooks, and legends to animate the story of students and the curriculum. The episodes depict historical events and cases that have shaped colleges, curricula, and students. The study…

In this article, I examine the degree to which academic advising has met the scholarship and research standards necessary to lay claim to designation as a discipline or as a profession. I include a review of 3 decades of observations on advising scholarship and research, a review of NACADA's efforts to advance research, and an analysis of trends…

Intrusive advising has been frequently used to encourage or require at-risk or probationary students to attend advising sessions. The efficacy of intrusive advising targeted to all students has received little attention. We implemented a case-control experiment with 501 first-year students at a large, urban, state university to test the efficacy…

A description of the kinds of educated humans to be cultivated at a particular institution can be found in the college or university vision statement. The extent that vision is reflected in the governing models of advising operations, known by personnel, and transformed into day-to-day activities was assessed through a NACADA membership survey.…

Business students' perceptions concerning several academic advising resources are presented. Using a Likert scale, students evaluated resources such as their academic advisor, course instructors, staffs, friends, and parents as well as the university catalog and the Foundations of Business Administration (FBA) course. Selected demographic…

A college or university's general approach to students and student support services, as reflected in its institutional vision, can serve to advocate the adoption of one type of advising structure, approach, and delivery system over another. A content analysis of a nationwide sample of institutional vision statements from NACADA-membership colleges…

In this study, I examined the effectiveness of adding insight-oriented strategies to an intrusive academic-advising approach with students on academic probation. Twenty males and 22 females at a comprehensive private university participated in the study. Students who attended three to eight meetings had a significant improvement in semester GPA…

Although previous research has not consistently shown that uncertainty about academic major negatively impacts graduation, commitment is largely believed to affect college students' success. We investigated the impact of institutional commitment, commitment to an educational goal, and commitment to an academic major on the probabilities of…