Recommended Curricular Change and Persistence in College

Abstract

Counselor judgment regarding the appropriateness of student curricular choice and the strength of counselor commitment to that judgment were related to student persistence in college. Students who failed to change curricula when the counselor felt such change was indicated remained at the University a fewer number of terms than any of the other groups studied. Sex of student and strength of counselor judgment regarding curricular choice were also significantly related to persistence, although strength of counselor judgment regarding curricula choice was best treated as moderating the relationship between student behavior in Flation to counselor judgment and academic performance. Results were discussed in terms of objectives and procedures of counseling with respect to academic performance.. N ANEARLIER STUDY, Marks, Ashby, I and Zeigler (1965) found a significant relationship between college academic achievement and counselor recommendations regarding student curricular choice. In that study, first semester grade-point average was employed as a measure of academic achievement. It was of some inter-EDMOND MARKS is Associate Director of Student Affairs Research at The Pennsyluania State Uniuersity. JEFFERSON D. ASHBY is Acting Director of the Division of Counseling, and GARY A. NOLL is a graduate assitonb with Student Affairs Research at The Pennsylvania State Uniuersity.est to examine whether similar results would obtain when a longer term and somewhat different measure of academic performance was employed.Persistence and grade-point average are frequently treated as conceptually equivalent measures of the behavior domain more commonly called academic performance. Recent data collected by the authors indicate that the relationship between persistence (as measured by term standing at the time of withdrawal) and grade-point average (at time of withdrawal) is at best moderate, the product moment melation being about -40, suggesting that the antecedents of these two 974 Personnel and Guidance ~o u m i