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The Long View: Charting Purposeful Pathways through Advising
One of the first things you notice on the homepage of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cross-College Advising Service (CCAS) is a link: “Learn why it’s okay to be undecided,” it reads. Following the link pulls up a presentation detailing the reasons why it is perfectly acceptable—and even beneficial—to enter college without a good idea of what to study. “A liberal education is all about the fact that students really should have an open mind to the possibilities,” says Timothy Walsh, assistant dean and director of the CCAS. The Cross-College Advising Service exists solely to help students who are undecided—Walsh calls them “exploring”—make informed decisions and plan out their liberal education.
Prior to the CCAS’s creation in 1994, there was no central office where students who arrived at UW-Madison without a clear idea of what they wanted to study could go to explore the possibilities. They might get some advice from their assigned adviser or by talking to the professors teaching their first classes, but many students received little guidance. About a quarter of each first-year class—between 1,800 and 1,900 students each year—are undecided, Walsh says, and prior to the mid-1990s, the university didn’t provide many resources to students for making decisions about their course of study. The changes in UW-Madison’s philosophy since then have been significant. Undergraduate advising has become more central, and the focus on helping students make intentional educational choices has taken a prominent role.
The Wisconsin Experience
In the past few academic years, administrators and faculty members have adopted the LEAP essential learning outcomes as a primary component of an educational philosophy called the Wisconsin Experience, says Ann Groves Lloyd, UW-Madison associate dean of student academic affairs. The Wisconsin Experience is a framework for producing graduates who think “beyond the conventional wisdom” and are adaptable, engaged problem-solvers. It focuses on providing students with opportunities for high-impact learning practices like research experience, service learning, and learning communities. While administrators were working to frame the Wisconsin Experience, the provost’s office concurrently formed a council on academic advising that met monthly to review the structure of academic advising on campus. “The LEAP framework has given everyone working on student advising an idea of how the work they do individually with students is connected to the larger goals we have for students at Wisconsin,” Lloyd explains.
The council on academic advising—of which Walsh is a chair—worked during the 2008-09 academic year to develop a set of guiding principles for academic advising. These include directives such as “facilitate academic exploration,” “engage [students] in identifying, developing and realizing their plans, goals, and possible careers,” and “encourage students to participate in out-of-class learning experiences.” The council also set a goal for UW-Madison to move from what Walsh calls “2-D advising” to a deeper advising process. In the old system, Walsh explains, the adviser would usually take out a degree audit report (DAR), talk about what requirements were finished, and outline how the student could finish the requirements that were still unfulfilled. “It would reinforce, unintentionally, this impoverished idea of what college is about—that it’s nothing more than a bunch of requirements,” he says. Now, UW-Madison are aiming for more “3-D” advising where advisers ask students what they’re doing on campus and how their education will involve experience with leadership, service learning, and campus engagement. They also use an “advising syllabus” to help students visualize what their next four years might look like in terms of decision making about classes, majors, and cocurricular activities. “We’re telegraphing to them the much wider sense of what their undergraduate education can be about,” Walsh says. “It’s very important to do this from the outset, for first-year students, to keep from confirming any expectations they might have about the checklist idea.”
Encouraging Broader Thinking
Another way UW-Madison targets first-year students for advising is through a network of five residence-hall-based advising offices. “We realized about eight years ago that we needed to be where the freshmen lived,” Walsh explains. “We put the offices on the first floors of buildings in high-traffic areas, so students are really willing to pop in for simple questions, and more comfortable coming in for bigger questions.” Each member of the professional advising staff spends some of his or her time working in the residence-hall offices, and a roster of peer advisers rounds out the staff.
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| Advisers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are moving toward a “3-D” advising method that includes discussion about students’ cocurricular activities and their options for leadership, service learning, and campus engagement.
Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison,
photographer Michael Forster Rothbartr |
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The addition of First-year Interest Groups (FIGs) several years ago provided another opportunity for first-year students to immediately become immersed in the broader ideas of a liberal education. FIGs are learning communities in which approximately twenty students live in the same residence hall and enroll in the same cluster of three courses centered on a theme, such as Race in the United States; Yoga: Methods and Goals; The World of the Vikings; and Making Meaning in an Evolutionary World. The students learn to draw connections across disparate disciplines by taking linked courses around a single theme—students in the Vikings FIG, for example, enroll in Literature in Translation, Introduction to Folklore, and introductory Swedish. While the FIGs, when they were first introduced in 2001, were taught by teaching assistants, faculty interest has increased so much than now senior faculty members generally volunteer to teach the FIG courses, Walsh says.
The CCAS, residence hall advising offices, and FIGs all help incoming students understand UW-Madison’s learning goals from their very first weeks on campus, and also encourage students to have deeper conversations about their undergraduate education throughout their four years. “LEAP and our Wisconsin Experience plan have made us more articulate when talking to students about the learning outcomes we want them to gain,” Lloyd says. “It helps get rid of the assembly line mentality—get the students in, get them out. We now have deeper conversations and help students reflect upon and articulate their experiences. Suddenly we are all speaking the same language, in academic advising and in other departments, and it really helps.”
Improving and Assessing Progress
In order to measure how well the Wisconsin Experience is working to help students understand the benefits of a liberal education, UW-Madison Dean of Students Lori Burquam and other administrators will be assessing various aspects of the framework during coming academic years. In the advising and career services offices, Lloyd explains, administrators might conduct surveys to measure students’ interest in particular career areas—such as nonprofit work—before and after the students attend advising sessions, workshops, and career fairs, and compare the students’ interest levels and attitudes with those of students who did not participate in such activities. Assessments of this type will provide tangible evidence of how UW-Madison is helping students fulfill the personal and social responsibility learning outcome, by increasing their understanding of how they can have a civically engaged career. Then, individual offices like advising can fine-tune their services to help students in their achievement and understanding of the essential learning outcomes, Lloyd explains.
In coming years, the advising program at UW-Madison will get an additional financial and programmatic boost through the Madison Initiative, a plan proposed by Chancellor Carolyn ‘Biddy’ Martin in March 2009 and approved by students through a vote earlier this year. The Madison Initiative includes a tuition increase of $250 per in-state student per year for four years, with half of the money going directly to fund need-based financial aid. The other half of the funding will be used to cover hiring faculty in high-interest areas so more class sections can be offered; advising services; and other student services. “The faith that our students have put into us with the Madison Initiative has really got us catching our breath and saying, ‘We must be really thoughtful and intentional and use this money to help the most students in the most ways,’” Lloyd says. The Madison Initiative will allow the number of FIGs to double in the next two years, and Walsh hopes that the money designated for advising can be used to expand the in-hall advising to include targeted programs, in addition to the open-door policy. He would like to especially target students who are interested in limited-enrollment programs like engineering and nursing, to make sure they stay on track for application to these programs while still keeping their options open in case they are not admitted.
UW-Madison faces some challenges—technology to track students’ advising records if they switch programs or colleges is not up speed, for example, Lloyd says, and some faculty members are still resistant to teaching students in the multidisciplinary, high-impact ways that the Wisconsin Experience highlights. But both she and Walsh expect that progress will continue to happen steadily in coming years. “We’ve really shifted the focus back to undergraduate education. The whole fabric of the undergraduate experience has changed very noticeably,” Walsh says.
For more information about academic advising at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, visit the for Cross-College Advising Service Web page.
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