Facilitating Master's Student Success: A Quantitative Examination of Student Perspectives on Advising

Faculty advising is crucial for student success, but little is known about the specific relationship between advising and master’s students’ success. Given that master’s student enrollment is growing and diversifying, examining the relationships between advising and success is imperative for institutional efficiency and educational excellence. This quantitative study investigated nearly 1,000 master’s students’ experiences with two primary types of advising—administrative and mentoring. The study looked for correlations with multiple proxies of student success (e.g., graduation, retention, institutional commitment, and GPA). As well, other potentially influential individual, educational, and organizational variables (e.g., background characteristics, peer culture, and department climate) were examined for their effect on the relationship between advising and success. Results indicate that student satisfaction with advising is correlated with success. In particular, student satisfaction with administrative advising, which communicates accurate policies and helps students form educational plans, increased student success. Student satisfaction with mentoring advising, which emphasizes individualized professional support (e.g., feedback on thesis writing) was also shown to facilitate master’s student success. Recommendations highlight the importance of creating degree maps and electronic degree tracking as a form of administrative advising support for students and the importance of having nurturing multiple faculty-student contacts within the department to build collegial rapport and mentoring relationships. FACILITATING MASTER’S STUDENT SUCCESS ii Acknowledgements I am very grateful to a number of people for making this dissertation possible including my adviser and mentor, Christine Cress, for believing in me, giving me countless opportunities to research, consult, present, and teach, and helping me become the researcher I am today; my master’s adviser and mentor, Janine Allen, and her research partner, Cathleen Smith, for inspiring my research and giving me my first graduate assistantship, without which I would not have begun this journey; DeLys Ostlund for making this study possible, creating a job for me, and serving on my committee in multiple capacities; Karen Haley for supporting me through this process and sharing a passion for graduate student development; Moti Hara for teaching me quantitative analysis and changing my life; Vicki Wise for providing me with opportunities to intern and learn about assessment and for serving on my proposal committee; Margaret Everett for providing me with great opportunities to apply my knowledge at the Office of Graduate Studies; my cohort for sharing this experience; Brett McFarlane for sharing a passion for advising and student success; Tommy Van Cleave for traveling these five years with me; Maureen Reed for guiding me in this process; Daveena Tauber for helping me get unstuck and find my way; my parents for their love and support; my brother for always believing in me and talking stats; my running partner, Debbie Hall, for helping me figure it all out on the road; my dear friend, Karey Gold, for supporting me through this process; and most of all my daughters and my husband for supporting me in my work and always believing in me. FACILITATING MASTER’S STUDENT SUCCESS iii Table of