The Self Concept Change as a Tool for Developmental Academic Advising

Abstract

The main goals of academic advising are not only to improving social and academic success of students during academic year, but to improve the retention of the students with the successful interventions inside the educational system. Many areas of practice and research are mentioned in the scientific literature. One of them is improving students' self-concept in order to make them more successful at their academic concerns. However, except for self-efficacy, few researchers took other important aspects of self-concept into consideration. Self-perceived values are the target in our research. The present research is inspired from a practical work of students' developmental advising and shows how self-perceptions of the students regarding certain characteristics could be positively altered not only by using an intervention derived from Festinger's social comparison theory (1) but also application of positive psychology (2). It has been found that students' self-perception is altered when students learned and improved their consciousness about how other peers perceive them regarding certain characteristics. Besides confirming once again the reality of social comparison theory in academic context, practical implications of the findings for developmental academic advising are concluded.