Abstract
Introduction
Nursing and allied health students represent a significant percentage of undergraduate students. Academic advising is integral to students’ success.
Objective
This study aimed to identify nursing and allied-health science students’ perspectives on academic advising functions and identify the demographic factors associated with these perspectives.
Methods
A cross-sectional, correlational study was conducted with 252 students who completed a survey on students’ perspectives on academic advising functions. Students were recruited from a large public university in western Saudi Arabia.
Results
The results revealed that 97.6% of students reported knowing their academic advisor and 80.8% reported meeting with their advisor at least once over the past year. Overall, students perceived academic advising as important (M = 4.0, SD ± 0.86). The social role of academic advising was perceived as its most important function (M = 4.1, SD ± 0.85), followed by the academic role (M = 4.0, SD ± 0.87) and the personal role (M = 3.9, SD ± 0.87). The results showed that junior students perceived academic advising as more important than their counterparts. There was a weak significant correlation between students’ perception of academic advising functions and the number of meetings held with their advisors.
Conclusion
Faculty should improve students’ understanding of the academic advisor's role in academic progress. Students understanding of their academic advisor's role in supporting their academic progress should be emphasized, especially among senior students.
Introduction
Nursing education and other allied health specialties are becoming more prevalent in Saudi Arabia (Almarwani, 2022). Nursing and allied health students represent a significant percentage of students in Saudi universities. Students receiving excellent academic advisory services are more likely to succeed in their undergraduate studies (Snyder & Quinn Griffin, 2020). A key challenge facing the education system is high attrition rates. For example, 20% of undergraduate nursing students in the United States fail to complete their nursing program (Elkins, 2019). The attrition rate of nursing students remains a serious concern for nursing educators (Alshutwi et al., 2021). Several factors may contribute to this, including the availability and effectiveness of the academic advising process during students’ enrollment in the program (Chan et al., 2019; Smith-Wacholz et al., 2019).
Review of the Literature
Academic advising is essential for developing student behavior and supports student retention (Snyder & Quinn Griffin, 2020; Taylor & Perry, 2019). An academic advisor helps a student in all areas of the educational process by acting as a mentor, coach, and academic planner (Hart-Baldridge, 2020). An academic advisor can increase students’ success by promoting their self-efficacy in the learning process (Hayes et al., 2020). Furthermore, academic advising reduces 1st-year students’ drop-out rate (Kot, 2014) and significantly impacts undergraduate students’ education experience (Holland et al., 2020). In medical and allied health specialties, academic advising is necessary to assist students in successfully navigating their programs (Howse et al., 2017). It helps ensure that students complete their program on time (Snyder & Quinn Griffin, 2020). The academic adviser's role includes discussing their achievements, failures, and personal matters affecting their academic performance (Chan, 2016). Academic advisors have been introduced in universities worldwide and have assisted in lowering student dropout rates (Hart-Baldridge, 2020). Successful academic advising requires understanding the roles and responsibilities of all parties, including advisors, students, and the wider faculty (Chan et al., 2019).
There are several challenges associated with academic advising. For example, in one study, Bridgen (2017) found that administration, faculty members, students, and staff misunderstood the university's academic advising purposes and functions. In another study, Chan et al. (2019) found that the means of communication used in advising, time constraints for advisor-advisee meetings, and a lack of training for advisors impacted the value of academic advising.
Previous studies suggest that various communication tools, time management, and adequate training must be implemented to improve academic advising's effectiveness (Bridgen, 2017; Chan et al., 2019). In addition, adopting “Enhanced Advising Programs” that are dynamically created will improve the participation of both faculty and students (Donaldson et al., 2020). Introducing learning analytic dashboards in different universities would assist academic advisors in handling difficult cases, like students failing many courses (Gutiérrez et al., 2020) and improve advisors’ training (Maddineshat et al., 2019). Academic administrators must adequately allocate resources so advisors have adequate time to provide humanized, holistic, and proactive academic advising regardless of their advisees’ circumstances (Light, 2021).
Theoretical Framework
Biggs’ (2014) constructive alignment (CA) model may assist educators and academic advisors in focusing their program objectives on what students should know during their program enrollment (Grande et al., 2021). Students’ awareness of the program requirements and responsibilities is essential to their success. Furthermore, the CA model argues that students’ experiences may impact their learning (Grande et al., 2022a). In this study, students’ academic advising experiences may influence their learning ability in the program. Therefore, teachers should engage students in learning experiences that increase their chances of reaching specific outcomes (Biggs, 2014), which could be linked to the responsibilities of academic advisors.
Academic Advising in Saudi Universities
There are 29 public universities, 25 private universities, and seven military colleges in Saudi Arabia (Ministry of Education, 2022, January). All 1st-year students must be assigned to an academic advisor. Article 40 in Saudi Arabia's universities system, 1442–1443, published by the Ministry of Education, states that university academics should spend time teaching, conducting research, and participating in academic advising activities (Ministry of Education, 2022). In many universities, advisors must have at least ten students to whom they should provide academic advising services. The number of students per advisor varies based on their category (assistant teacher, assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor). According to the roles and regulations in Saudi universities, all academic advisors must meet their students at least once per semester.
An academic advisor has several responsibilities, including preparing and guiding students in selecting appropriate courses following their academic plan and achieving the best outputs. They are also responsible for assisting the student in preparing their study schedule to complete graduation requirements within the maximum number of years allowed. Furthermore, they must guide academically struggling students to help them overcome challenges and achieve goals.
In summary, students’ perspectives on academic advising practices in health science programs must be investigated (Chan et al., 2019; Maddineshat et al., 2019). Therefore, this study aims to identify health science students’ perspectives on the functions of academic advising. Specifically, the study seeks to identify students’ perceptions of current academic advising practices and identify associated demographic factors. The study hypothesizes that there are no statistical differences in participants’ demographic characteristics and perspectives toward academic advising.
Methods
Study Design
This study uses a cross-sectional, correlational study design. The STROBE guidelines were used throughout all parts of the research.
Research Questions:
How do nursing and health science students perceive academic advising functions? Are there any demographic factors that influence students’ perspectives toward academic advising?
Sample
This study was conducted in a large governmental university in the western region of Saudi Arabia. The university has three large branches located throughout the western region. The university has 28 colleges and approximately 80,000 enrolled students. A convenience sample of 252 undergraduate students was included in the study. The sample size was calculated using G Power software following these parameters: effect size = 0.25, alpha = 0.05, power = 0.95. The sample size needed for this study was 197 participants. To reduce bias and attrition rates and improve the response rate, the sample size was increased by 15%.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To be eligible, students needed to be enrolled in a nursing, dentistry, or allied-health college. Students in their internship year or who had transferred to the college within the last semester were excluded.
Procedure
An email was sent to 45 academic advisors at the nursing, dentistry, and allied-health colleges. The advisors were asked to forward an invitation to participate in this study to their respective students, including 750 students across colleges. The invitation included an introduction to the study and a link to the Survey Monkey platform. The survey was in English because all students enrolled in health science colleges must have an intermediate level of English proficiency.
Instrument
The research instrument was adapted with permission from Van et al. (2018) and included 13 items. In addition, a literature review was conducted to expand the instrument to satisfy all academic advising roles. The initial instrument consisted of 37 items; however, face validity showed a need to reduce the items to 26 in the final stage. The instrument was a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree. Items were divided into three constructs reflecting students’ overall perspective of their advisors’ primary roles, including academic, social, and personal. Higher scores indicated that students perceived that item as more important. Cronbach's alpha scores for the academic, social, and personal role items were 0.93, 0.94, and 0.91, respectively. The overall Cronbach's alpha score was 0.97.
Statistical Analysis
Data were analyzed using SPSS version 19. There was no missing data because the researcher used enforced answers in the online survey. The parametric test’s assumptions were examined before an appropriate analysis was conducted. None of the primary or secondary assumptions were violated; therefore, parametric tests were applied. Descriptive statistics, including mean and standard deviation, were conducted to report on sample demographics, including gender, college, academic year, GPA, familiarity with their advisor, and the number of student meetings with them. Overall mean scores and mean scores for individual items and the academic, social, and personal role items were calculated. Independent-sample t-tests and one-way ANOVA tests were used to examine the significance of demographic characteristics’ impact on students’ perspectives toward academic advising. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between the students’ perspectives toward academic advising, the students’ GPA, and the number of meetings held with their advisors. The statistical significance (α level) was set at 0.05.
Institution Review Board Approval
Ethical considerations were satisfied by the approval of the nursing college IRB committee ((TUCN-REC)-2021-3-2nd)) at Taibah University.Consent was indicated by responding to the survey. Survey responses were anonymous, and each returned survey was assigned a code. Participation was clearly stated as voluntary, no credits were given for participation, and there were no consequences if students chose not to participate. The anonymous online survey did not require identifiable information from the participants; therefore, their confidentiality was protected.
Results
Sample Characteristics
Two-hundred fifty-two completed surveys were returned, which yields a response rate of 33.6%. Most participants were nursing students (88.9%, n = 224). The remaining students (11.1%) were from other health-related specialties. The majority of participants were female (76.6%, n = 193). Students belonged to different academic levels ranging from 2nd- to 5th-year students. 2nd-year students comprised the largest group (33.7%, n = 85). Students’ GPAs ranged from 3.24 to 4.97, with a mean of 4.61 (SD ± 0.31; Table 1).
Demographical Characteristics.
Almost all students (97.6%, n = 246) reported knowing their academic advisor. The number of student meetings with their advisors ranged from 0 to 9. Nearly half of the students (42.4%, n = 106) reported meeting with their advisor between 1 and 2 times during the academic year to discuss their academic problems and progress. Around 19.2% of students did not meet with their advisor during the year, while 6.2% met with their advisor at least seven times during the year (Table 1).
Research Question Results
Students’ Perspectives on Academic Advising Functions
Table 2 shows the mean scores of students’ perspectives on academic advising functions. The overall mean score was high (M = 4.0, SD ± 0.86), indicating that students perceived academic advising functions as important. Students also perceived the three constructs of academic advising as having important functions. The social aspect of academic advising was perceived as the most important function (M = 4.1, SD ± 0.85). This was closely followed by the academic role (M = 4.0, SD ± 0.87), and the personal role was perceived as least important (M = 3.9, SD ± 0.87). Interestingly, students perceived being educated about time management and decision-making skills as the most important functions of their advisor. They perceived their advisors’ least important function as monitoring absences or tardiness (Table 2).
Students’ Perspective Towards Academic Advising Functions.
Association Between Demographic Characteristics and Perceptions on Academic Advisors
The results demonstrated no statistically significant difference between demographical factors and the perceptions of the academic advising function, suggesting that students perceive the function of academic advising similarly. These factors included gender (p = .46), nationality (p = .20), marital status (p = .25), and the student's area of study (p = .37) (Table 3). However, there was a statistically significant difference between students in different academic years (F = 2.75, df = 3, p = .04): the lower the student's academic year, the more they perceived academic advising as important. Academic advising functions were highly appreciated by 2nd-year students (M = 4.3, SD ± 0.82), and this appreciation decreased as the student progressed to later years. 5th-year students reported the lowest mean score (M = 3.7, SD = 0.69) (Table 3).
Demographics and Perception of Academic Advising.
*Significant at p < .05.
Similarly, there were statistically significant differences between students who knew their academic advisor and those who did not (t = 1.18, df = 250, p = .04). Unsurprisingly, students who knew their academic advisor perceived academic advising as more important (M = 4.1, SD ± 0.84) than those who did not know their advisor (M = 3.6, SD = 0.51; Table 3).
A small but significant correlation existed between students’ perception of academic advising functions and the number of meetings held with the advisor (r = .17; Table 4). There was also a very weak correlation between students’ perception of academic advising functions and their GPA (p = .25, r = .08).
Correlation Between Perspectives Toward Academic Advising, GPA, and the Number of Advising Meetings.
Discussion
This study found that undergraduate health science students perceived academic advising as highly important. To comply with university regulations, advisors must meet their cohort students at least once per semester. Those with academic, social, or personal problems must meet more often with their advisors. In this study, student-advisor meetings occurred three times on average throughout the academic year (range = 0–9). However, 2.4% of participants did not know their academic advisor, and 19.2% have not met their academic advisor.
In general, this study was consistent with previous studies’ conclusions about the importance of academic advising (Lynch & Lungrin, 2018; Zarges et al., 2018). Among the three constructs assessed by this study, students considered the social role of academic advisors as the most important. These results contrast the findings of Van et al.'s (2018) study, where academic roles were perceived as the most important. This may be explained by the fact that socializing is integral to Saudi people's lives (Almaghaslah & Alsayari, 2022). Therefore, it is crucial that academic advising involves an element of peer advising to accommodate the social and academic aspects of a student's educational experience.
Additionally, this study's results are consistent with Snyder and Quinn Griffin's (2020) study, in which the majority of nursing students reported high levels of perceived effectiveness of academic advising. Most nursing students reported that they prefer the traditional method of academic advising, where they meet with their advisers face-to-face (Snyder & Quinn Griffin, 2020).
There were gender differences in students’ perspectives on the function of academic advising. This is consistent with Suvedi et al.'s (2015) study, which found that female students perceived academic advising as more important than male students. This may be because male students face problems associated with academic advising. One study reported that more male students experience issues related to academic advising compared to female students (Banat, 2015). Therefore, special attention should be given to male students’ academic advising.
Students perceived their advisors’ role in educating them about time management and decision-making skills as the most important function of academic advising. Students’ specialty in nursing and other health-related specialties increases the importance of training in these areas as they will need them in their everyday practice. These issues may adversely affect students’ progress and readiness for practice (Rusch et al., 2019). Students’ self-confidence and efficacy in performing training tasks have been found to affect their progress and readiness for practice (Aller & Almarwani, 2022). According to Hayes et al. (2020), advisers can play an important role in increasing students’ self-efficacy toward their learning and practice (Hayes et al., 2020).
Monitoring students’ absences or tardiness was perceived as unimportant in this study. However, monitoring students’ absence was perceived as highly important in another study in Saudi Arabia (Kaur et al., 2022). Students’ awareness could explain the difference as they may perceive that absences would exclude them from the exam and lead to them failing their program. Student advising programs must provide comprehensive rationales for academic advising roles. Furthermore, educators must explore the factors that may affect students’ perspectives on and satisfaction with their academic advising process. Several factors influence students’ satisfaction with their academic advisors. For example, a qualitative study reported that dental advisors’ characteristics, such as communication skills and general attitude toward the academic advising process, influenced students’ satisfaction with their academic advisors (Golshah et al., 2022).
Academic advising was perceived as more important among newer students. In this study, academic advising was highly appreciated by 1st-year students. Fosnacht et al. (2017) found that students met 1 to 3 times with their academic advisor during their first year. The perceived importance of academic advising declined with students’ seniority level. This could be explained by students’ decreased dependence on their advisors as they progress and become more knowledgeable about their program's requirements.
Students who knew their academic advisors and had direct contact with them recognized academic advising as more important than those who did not. Furthermore, as the number of meetings with their advisors increased, students perceived the importance of academic advising functions as more important. This is consistent with the result of Fosnacht et al.'s (2017) study, which found that the majority of students perceived academic advising as highly important. Furthermore, this study indicated that students meet 1 to 2 times with their academic advisor during the academic year, consistent with Fosnacht et al.'s (2017) study. Advisors’ ability to effectively deliver advising sessions that improve students’ communication, knowledge, and interpersonal skills satisfies students and encourages them to continue their sessions (Menke et al., 2018). Therefore, academic advisors should increase their meeting frequency with their students.
Strengths and Limitations
This study considers among the first studies that measure student perspectives of academic advising on healthcare specialties. The variety of the study sample, which recruited participants from different health science colleges, provided a more comprehensive look at the student perspective of academic advising. This study has some limitations. It was conducted using a cross-sectional design which prevents the determination of causality. In addition, the sample was drawn from three health sciences colleges; however, the nursing college sample was dominant, which may affect the study's generalizability. Research among larger, more diverse samples from various health sciences colleges is needed to confirm the current study's findings.
Implications for Practice
The study outcomes inform academic advising administration about students’ perceptions of academic advising. This study has the potential to accelerate the enhancement of current practices. For example, a clear explanation of advisors’ roles promotes the development of comprehensive advising programs.
Recommendations for Researchers
Findings from this study can inform academic advisors and their institutions; however, there is a need for further research in this field. Researchers should explore current advising practices and their effect on student retention and progress. In health science colleges, it is important to investigate the relationship between academic advisement, preparation, and students’ readiness to practice. Future researchers should conduct studies that collect data from multiple universities to improve the generalizability of the results. Finally, the relationship between academic advising and students’ nursing and allied health competency should be further investigated, drawing upon previous findings (Grande et al., 2022b).
Conclusion
This study found that Saudi undergraduate health sciences students perceived academic advising as important. The personal role of the advisor was considered least important, while the social role of the advisor was considered most important, reflecting the social nature of Saudi students. Furthermore, the varied nature of health sciences college students’ studies was reflected in their perception of the importance of time management and decision-making skills. Students understanding of their academic advisor's role in supporting their academic progress should be emphasized, especially among senior students.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all academic advisors for encouraging their students to participate in this study. They also thank all students from all colleges for their participation.
Author Contributions
All authors contributed to this research. Khalid Aljohani (KA), Paul Gracia (PG) Maria Natividad (MN) participated in the conceptualization, methodology, and project administration phases, where they wrote research proposals and obtained the IRB approval as well as wrote the original draft. Helen M. Gamboa (HMG), Ahmad Tubaishat (AT), and Mohammad S. Aljohani (MSN) participated in the data curation phase and were responsible for formal data analysis. Abdulaziz Mofdy Almarwani (AMA) participated in writing the original draft and validating the results of the study with (AT), (HMF), and (MSN). (KA) was the research administrator where the final manuscript where modified.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Consideration
Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the Deanship of Higher Education and Research at the College of Nursing-Taibah University ((TUCN-REC)-2021-3-2nd)).
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
