How do you keep students enrolled once they decide to attend a university? Does academic advising have an influence on their choice to stay? These were questions that Drs. Lisa Walters and Mojtaba Seyedian of Fredonia’s Department of Business Administration asked themselves while working together on a paper discussing their research to help advance academic advising.
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| Dr. Mojtaba Seyedian |
Dr. Lisa Walters |
The motivation behind the paper was to find a way to keep students enrolled once they decided to attend the university and what influence academic advising has on their choice to stay. In the Business Administration department, the number of advisees that one advisor has is substantial. One faculty member may be advising about 60 different students, so it was important to Dr. Walters and Dr. Seyedian to try and identify what the leading factors are in a successful advising session.
The model used to conduct this research, known as the Quality Function Deployment model, is what industries use when attempting to understand what a customer needs and how to meet those requirements. The researchers took this model that is designed for a business and applied it to academic advising to figure out what a student is looking to get out of advising.
The paper, “Improving Academic Advising Using Quality Function Deployment: A Case Study” is to be published in an upcoming issue of College Student Journal, a national publication devoted to dissemination of new ideas to enhance student success in university.
