Joe Cuseo - Regular assessment of academic advisement sends a clear message to advisors that student advising is an important professional responsibility and increases the likelihood that weaknesses in the advising program are identified and corrected. Conversely, failure to monitor and evaluate the quality of advising tacitly communicates the message that it is a student service which is not valued by the institution. As Linda Darling-Hammond, higher education research specialist for the Rand Corporation, points out: “If there’s one thing social science research has found consistently and unambiguously . . . it’s that people will do more of whatever they are evaluated on doing. What is measured will increase, and what is not measured will decrease. That’s why assessment is such a powerful activity. It cannot only measure, but change reality” (quoted in Hutchings & Marchese, 1990). Thus, the mere fact that advisors are aware that their advising is being  assessed may, in itself, lead to improvement in the quality of academic advisement they deliver.

Assessment should reflect the perspectives of advisors, as well as students. Advisors should be given the opportunity to assess the quality of administrative support they receive for advising—for example, the effectiveness of orientation, training, and development they received, the usefulness of support materials or technological tools provided for them, the viability of their advisee case load, and the effectiveness of advising administrative policies and procedures. National survey research of first-year student advising practices indicates that only 11% of postsecondary institutions involve advisors as evaluators in the assessment process (Policy Center on the First Year of College, 2003). This is a disappointing finding, because involving advisors in the assessment process can serve two very valuable purposes: (a) provides front-line feedback to the advising program director that can be used for program improvement, and (b) enables advisors to become active agents (rather than passive recipients) of evaluation, which serves to increase their personal investment in, and “ownership” of, the advisement program.

   Advisors can also become more active agents in the assessment process if they engage in self-assessment. This could be done in narrative form, perhaps as part of an advising portfolio, which would include (a) a personal statement of advising philosophy, (b) advising strategies employed, (c) advisor development activities, (d) self-constructed advising materials (e.g., an advising syllabus), and (e) responses to student evaluations. This type of advisor self-assessment could also be used as evidence of advising quality and counted in decisions about promotion and advancement in rank, comparable to how the “teaching portfolio” is used in faculty evaluation of instructional effectiveness.