A Study on the Effect of the Developmental Academic Advising Based on Student Engagement for University Freshman

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the “Developmental Academic Advising Seminar” for first-year university students which was developed based on student engagement. To this end, the following three steps were taken. First, this study reviewed previous literature on academic advising and designed a developmental academic advising seminar centered on student engagement. Second, the seminar was provided to first-year university students for two hours per week for the first five weeks at “A” University in the Seoul metropolitan area. Third, the differences before and after the seminar participation were analyzed through the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test after conducting a pre- and post-test on learning motivation and educational effectiveness for participants. In addition, through interviews, the effects of the seminar were examined in terms of quality. The research results were as follows. First, developmental academic advising seminars showed a positive effect on increasing learning motivation, helping academic and career design, and improving satisfaction of faculty teaching methods and educational content. Second, academic advising focused on diverse student activities, helping them with self-reflection and their understanding of others. The results of this study suggest that teaching first-year university students should be conducted based on presentations and discussions focusing on student engagement, professional academic advising on self-reflection, and academic and career path designing, all of which are closely related to university life, rather than professor-centered lectures. This study is meaningful in that it was conducted for a small group of freshmen in order to analyze the contents of individual students' learning motivation and to make changes in educational effectiveness.