Academic Advising Literature Since 1965: a College Student Personnel Abstracts Review

Abstract

College Student Personnel Abstracts, a quarterly journal, contains summaries of articles, papers, and reports about college students, faculty, and student services. The staff of College Student Personnel Abstracts scans more than 200 scholarly and professional journals regularly for articles containing research and theory on topics of interest t o persons working with college students-advisors, admissions officers, counselors, financial aid officers, housing directors, career planning and placement officers, student activities advisors, and deans of students. Starting in fall 1981, CSPA added topics of particular interest to academic administrators and faculty members generally. CSPA is published by Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California 917 11. As a resource for academic advisors, CSPA offers several advantages. It summarizes the advising literature along with other topics of interest t o advisors such as student development, career planning, faculty roles and responsibilities, and student attrition and retention. Unlike sourcebooks and reviews, which quickly become outdated, CSPA's ongoing issues cover new developments and studies as they appear. The author of an abstracted paper or article can be contacted for further information using his or her position and institution (noted at the end of the abstract). For readers wishing to add t o their bibliographies, CSPA's inclusion of the number of references in the original material indicates most likely sources. Finally, CSPA's quarterly and annual subject and author indexes provide ready access t o materials of interest, while the individual abstracts provide the essential content of the original paper or article and complete citation information. The source of this review of the literature on advising is the fifty-eight quarterly issues of College Student Personnel Abstracts published since this journal's inception in 1965. All of the more than 150 materials reviewed have been summarized in CSPA. Most of the items appeared under the contents heading Faculty, Advising. The rest were located from the subject index under advising. Although academic advising literature largely criticizes the traditional advising system and includes numerous proposals for change, two principles have been maintained consistently: faculty members are the core of effective academic advising, and advising is an important element to student success and satisfaction in college. Of the two main categories of literature on academic advising covered by CSPA, about equal proportions consist of research and of theory and models.