Student Engagement in Virtual College Affordability Advising: Advisor and Student Perceptions of Best Practices

• In Event: Pebbles in a Field and Other Nuggets Learned From Four Text Messaging and Advising Interventions

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This study explores best practices in student engagement through virtual (i.e., long-distance) advising. The rationale for this study is grounded in the steady shift of substantive interactions among students and counselors from in-person to online. New research is needed that explores what works in helping students to build relationships, complete tasks, and navigate educational bureaucracy while pursuing a college degree.

Theoretical Framework
This study relies on student engagement theory, interpreted through an ecological lens (Arnold, Chewning, Castleman, & Page, 2015; Arnold, Deutschlander, & Lewis, 2017; Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1993). Student engagement is conceptualized, largely, as the extent to which a student will invest time and energy on educationally-purposeful tasks (Kuh, 2009). Students must be both willing and able to engage with their virtual advisor in order to realize the benefits of the relationship. Additionally, this study relies on nudge theory to sustain the efficacy of a virtual advising intervention (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Virtual advising interventions include reminders to high school seniors crafting their college lists, completing aid applications, and comparing financial aid offers; assistance provided to college students struggling with bill payment, indirect expenses, and aid renewal; wraparound advising as part of a federally-funded, national, RCT; and targeted support for students affiliated with other non-profits or engaged in distinct college access pipeline programs. The wide range of interventions offers a natural laboratory through which to articulate what works in helping students to engage with a virtual advisor.

Data sources
Findings from this study will be drawn from qualitative analysis of interview and focus group data provided by students, advisors and program directors at uAspire, a non-profit organization. Since 2011, uAspire has developed a variety of virtual advising interventions, and delivered these primarily through text message to roughly 20,000 high school and 10,000 college students nationally. Students are best positioned to indicate which aspects of the virtual advising intervention were most useful or salient, while advisors have absorbed lessons about which specific methods or tactics were most effective in developing or enhancing relationships with their advisees. Furthermore, program directors add a layer of synthesis across multiple advisors and an ability to compare expected with actual student behavior.

Results
Results are likely to suggest that student engagement improves when advisors offer precise, actionable advice; when advisors use empathic language to establish caring relationships; when advisors and students respond to one another within a specific amount of time; and when students see tangible, positive outcomes as a result of following their advisor’s recommendations.

Scholarly Significance
Parents, teachers, and counselors—essentially, anyone who interacts with students approaching or moving through college—compete for students’ attention; increasing numbers do so via text message, as “smartphone ownership is nearly universal” among teens (Pew Research Center, 2018, p. 7). It is crucial that these mentors, guides, and support professionals effectively meet students where they are. To do so, they must be educated in the tools and tactics that make this new form of communication useful.

Authors

• Jonathan Lewis, uAspire

• Karen D. Arnold, Boston College