Honors Program Theses

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Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Joyce Milambling

Keywords

College freshmen--Services for; College sophomores--Services for; Counseling in higher education;

Abstract

Freshman and sophomore years in college are a transitional period in a student's academic life, both externally and internally. Initially, one sees more external transitions such as . going from high school to colle.ge and going to class fifteen hours a week. However, alongside those external transitions, and eventually superseding them, the internal transitions begin to strongly influence the student's life: defining their identity; determining the best academic route; and questioning former beliefs about their interests and future. These internal transitions start a four-year journey of shifting needs and outlook. This journey determines how the student develops, what kind of student they become, how they make use of their academic collegiate experience, and ultimately what they do with their degree after college. Academic advising guides the student through these first two years of the journey in hopes of the student having the full knowledge and independence to guide themselves the rest of the way.

Freshmen and sophomores are often grouped together in terms of general needs and advising techniques, however, current research in academic advising in the United States claims that freshmen and sophomore students have different needs. Freshmen needs are more orientation-focused while sophomore needs are more future-focused (Gordon, Habley, & Associates, 2000). Research also claims that academic advisors need to adapt their methods of guidance to best suit the changing needs of each group of students. But is this true? Do the needs of freshmen students differ from those of sophomore students? If so, how do the academic advisors need to adapt?

In this thesis, the aforementioned research questions will be examined. The examination will commence with a review of the current literature research. This will include an introduction to NACADA, the definition of academic advising, the main theories of academic advising, the academic needs of different education levels, and how advisors change their methods of advising to accommodate those needs. Academic Advising: A Comprehensive Handbook (Gordon, Habley, & Associates, 2000), is considered to be the primary text in academic advising; more than thirty researchers from renowned education and post-secondary education university programs as well as from other academic-related fields collaborate in the content. Therefore, Academic Advising: A Comprehensive Handbook will be used frequently. Next, a study design will be presented on how the data will be collected from interviews with current University of Northern Iowa students. Then the data collected will be presented and analyzed through three themes of comparison between freshmen and sophomores. Finally, the thesis will conclude with the implications of the data collected being used to answer the research questions.

Year of Submission

2007

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

5-2007

Object Description

1 PDF file (26 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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