The relationship of academic advisement to the scholastic performance of failing college students.

The Non‐Achievement Syndrome, Group Therapy, and Achievement Change

“…Technology, Chicago. not directly related to personality and motivational variables have not been successful. Such approaches as academic advisement (Klingelhofer, 1954), vocational guidance (Kaess & Long, 1954), brief counseling (Goodstein & Crites, 1961), educational counseling (Patterson, 1957) and faculty counseling (Williamson, 1936), to name a few, did not effect changes in achievement patterns. Williamson (1936, p. 324) recognized the problem as early as 30 years ago, when he stated: "It seems that study motivation is too technical for faculty counselors and should be dealt with by specialized teachers.…”

Motivation and academic counseling.

“…If counseling leads to differential rates of attrition it seems probable that the populations sampled were not properly comparable at the time the controls were selected. Klingelhofer (1954) reports significantly better achievement by counseled than by non-counseled students on first probation in the College of Liberal Arts at the State University of Iowa. Since the control group was not matched on a person-by-person basis it is possible that differential attrition rather than counseling also is responsible for this finding.…”

“…Only if no attrition occurs does statistical matching of group measures provide results which are not vulnerable to this criticism. Examples of studies which used this kind of matching and which have been interpreted as evidence for the effectiveness of counseling are those of Blackwell (1946), Ivey (1962), Klingelhofer (1954) and Walters (1932), and as partial evidence by James (1962), Kirchheimer, Axelrod, and Hickerson (1949), and Ofman (1964). No differences were found in the measures of academic success used by Guthrie and O'Neill (1953), Scarborough and Wright (1957) nor Searles (1962).…”

Brief counseling with poor college risks.

“…Those students who decided to take advantage of this opportunity appeared to be extremely good counseling risks, since they supposedly had a high degree of academic motivation, they could anticipate immediate rewards for successful academic achievements, and theoretically they were quite anxious about their educational and vocational futures. Furthermore, in a recent study of the effects of brief counseling on the scholastic achievement of upperclassmen who were on academic probation at the State University of Iowa, Klingelhofer (1954) obtained results which indicated that the achievement of the counseled group was significantly greater than that of the matched b ut noncounseled control group. Thus, it was decided to intro-duce counseling as an experimental procedure as part of the summer program for these probationary, low ability college freshmen.…”