The Office of the Dean of the College sent a survey Nov. 10 to 300 students in each undergraduate class evaluating the University's current advising options. The survey comprises one aspect of a project called "The Values of an Open Curriculum: An Alternative Tradition in Liberal Education," which has been funded by the Teagle Foundation since 2004 and involves seven colleges in addition to Brown.
The Teagle Foundation, which is based in New York City, "provides leadership for liberal education, marshalling the intellectual and financial resources necessary to ensure that today's students have access to challenging, wide-ranging, and enriching college educations," according to the organization's Web site.
Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, who is among those conducting the survey, said she hopes the results will help the University and the other colleges, all of which have open curricula, to improve the "efficacy of advising."
Bergeron said the survey asks participating students, who were selected at random, how they think the student-adviser relationship should be defined, what students hope to gain from the advising system and what they feel is lacking in their current advising experience, Bergeron said.
"I see this as an opportunity for students to change the way we do advising at Brown," she said.
"What we decided was that by asking students questions ... we might be able to make some kinds of judgments on how to improve," Bergeron said. She added that the format of the survey, which includes both multiple-choice and open-ended questions, allows students to form a "more articulated response" than a survey featuring only multiple-choice questions.
Executive Associate Dean of the College Robert Shaw, who is also involved in the project, said student responses to the open-ended questions are providing the most constructive feedback so far.
"We found the written comments to be the most useful," said Shaw, who added that the office had received approximately 400 completed surveys as of Tuesday afternoon.
Though Bergeron has not yet reviewed any of the responses, she said she hopes to give students a forum to provide ideas on how to improve advising. The Office of the Dean of the College will open a public message board later this week allowing any student at the University to post comments about the current advising system.
"This is the best part of all," Bergeron said. "I'm excited to hear what the students have to say."
Shaw said results so far have shown that students want a more casual, intimate relationship with their advisers.
"The personal connection is terribly important to students," Shaw said, explaining that students are more likely to turn to friends or parents than advisers when seeking guidance.
"A relaxed discussion is important when you have an important decision to make," Shaw added.
According to Bergeron, survey results from all eight schools will be compiled by February 2007, at which point she and the other participants will begin analyzing the responses and eventually publish a "best practices paper" for advising strategies at schools with an open curriculum.
Bergeron said she plans to use results stemming from the program to initiate a "serious retooling" of the University's advising system, with special emphasis on reforming sophomore advising and concentration advising.
Yifan Luo '09, who took the survey and said the questions were "pretty basic ... but still somewhat useful," said she thinks both sophomore and concentration advising could use improvement.
"I thought that they should assign sophomores one adviser even if they don't pick one," Luo said. "That way they have somewhere to start and a person to go to for help."
Shaw said he hopes the project will help address concerns such as Luo's.
"All eight of us have strengths and weaknesses," Shaw said, referring to all the schools participating in the Teagle Foundation project. "We want to strengthen the strengths and weaken the weaknesses."
Donna Heiland, vice president of the Teagle Foundation, said she is confident the surveys administered by schools this month will lead to tangible improvements in the future.
"The Teagle Foundation is very focused on getting concrete results that can translate into action," Heiland said. "We want to make sure there's enough conversation, but we don't want to stop there. And the advising project looks like it is fit to do that."
Shaw said he also hopes the project will yield substantive improvements to advising that will be "useful not only to Brown and the other seven schools, but to any liberal arts college."
