Student-Faculty Informal Relationships and Freshman Year Educational Outcomes

This study investigated the relationship between student-faculty informal relationships and three freshman year educational outcomes. After controlling for the influence of 14 student pre-enroilment characteristics, such as high school academic performance, academic apti tude, personality needs, and expectations of certain aspects of college, eight measures of the frequency and strength of student-faculty in formal relationships accounted for statistically significant increases in the variance in freshman year academic performance and self-perceived intellectual and personal development. Partial correlations, controlling for the influence of all pre-enrollment characteristics and all other student-faculty relationship variables, indicated that frequency of student-faculty informal interactions focusing on intellectual or course related matters had the strongest positive association with academic performance and intellectual development. Interactions for the purpose of discussing students' career concerns had the strongest association with self-perceived personal growth. ONE OF THE MOST persistent and least assailable as sumptions in higher education has been that of the educa tional/developmental importance of informal student faculty relationships beyond the classroom. A number of prominent educators and researchers have emphasized the importance of college impacts other than the transmission of facts and knowledge (e.g., acculturation to the world of ideas, interpersonal skills, critical thinking ability, a sense of self and career identity, values clarification) and have argued, further, that close student-faculty interactions were a prin cipal determinant of the extent to which such impacts oc curred (1, 2, 3, 8,13). The earliest systematic research on the impact of college on students would appear to provide strong warrant for in vestigating the educational gains associated with students' informal contact with faculty. Jacob (6) studied a national sample of 22 institutions in order to determine their im pact on student values. Those institutions having a "pecu liar potency" with regard to their impact on student values tended to be characterized by such factors as a high degree of value homogeneity between the faculty and the students admitted, high expectations of students' intellectual inter ests and related academic performance, and frequent student-faculty informal contact. Jacob concludes that "faculty influence appears more pronounced at institutions where associations between faculty and students are nor mal and frequent, and students find teachers receptive to unhurried and relaxed conversations out of class" (6: 8). Strikingly similar conclusions have been reported by Eddy (4) in a study of 20 institutions. More recent research has focused on some of the speci fic educational outcomes associated with student-faculty interaction beyond the classroom. Evidence from a num ber of studies, for example, suggests that frequency of stu dent informal contact with faculty outside of class is posi tively associated with persistence (versus voluntary with drawal) at a particular institution (11,12, 15,17). As posited in a sociological, explanatory model of attrition conceptualized by Tinto (18), such evidence would suggest that student-faculty informal interaction increases a stu dent's degree of academic and social integration in an insti tution, thereby improving his or her likelihood of remain ing. Evidence from other investigations suggests that fre quency of student-faculty informal interaction may also be positively associated with more traditionally defined educa tional benefits. Perhaps the most comprehensive investiga tion of the educational correlates of faculty-student non classroom interaction has been conducted by Wilson and colleagues (19, 20) at eight colleges and universities. Divid ing students into categories of "high," "medium," and "low" interactors, based on their frequency of informal, non-classroom interaction with faculty, they found signifi cant differences in the proportions of high and low inter actors who as seniors reported having made "much progress" in the following academic skills and competencies: "knowledge of the specifics of a field of study"; "knowl edge of universals and abstractions in a field" ; "ability to comprehend, interpret, or extrapolate"; "ability to apply abstractions or principles." In all areas, the proportion of 184 THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH high interactors reporting "much progress" was significantly higher than the corresponding proportion of low inter actors. Moreover, high interactors also reported significantly greater change in "intellectual disposition," a clearer sense of career identity, and more positive attitudes toward their total college experience than did low interactors. Similar findings with respect to students' attitudes are reported by Pascarella and Terenzini (11). Two important weaknesses exist in the above investiga tions. First, the analyses are based on the total frequency of student-faculty contacts. No attempt was made to examine how different educational outcomes were asso ciated with different types of student-faculty interactions. Second, in their examination of the relationships between student-faculty interaction and educational outcomes, the above studies do not control for the potentially confound ing influence of the characteristics which students bring to college. As suggested by Wilson, et al. (19), the nature and frequency of student-faculty interactions are, in large measure, a function of the characteristics of those indivi duals involved in the interaction. They further report evi dence suggesting that students with a relatively high fre quency of informal contact with faculty had entering characteristics and orientations significantly more similar to those of their institution's faculty than did those stu dents reporting little or no contact. Thus, the statistically significant relationships reported between frequency of student-faculty contact and educational outcomes might disappear when student characteristics such as prior aca demic achievement, academic aptitude, and personality orientations are held constant. Spady (14), in developing a theoretical explanatory model of the college "drop-out" process, has suggested that students' patterns of interpersonal relationships and interactions with faculty will have an independent and direct influence not only on the development of intellectual interests and concerns, but also on more objectively as sessed indicators of their academic achievement, e.g., grade performance. In a sense, Spady's conceptual model argues that students' informal relationships with faculty will posi tively influence both extrinsic academic performance cri teria and the more intrinsic rewards of personal intellectual growth. In a subsequent investigation Spady (15) used a step wise regression model to control for such variables as family background, value orientations, high school exper iences, personality dispositions, academic potential, and subcultural orientations. He found that students' structural relationships within an institution, which included a single index of student-faculty contact, were more strongly asso ciated with a measure of intellectual development than with actual academic achievement. Unfortunately, Spady's study does not detail the nature of the index of student faculty contact used, nor does it attempt to disaggregate the influence of different types of student-faculty informal interaction. The latter omission may have masked substan tial relationships between academic achievement and cer tain types of student-faculty contact. The purpose of the present investigation was to extend the work of Wilson and colleagues (19, 20) and Spady (14, 15) through a further test of Spady's conceptual model. In an attempt to avoid the methodological weak nesses of previous research, the study investigated relation ships between specific freshman year educational outcomes and different kinds of student-faculty informal interaction, while controlling for student pre-enrollment characteristics. The freshman year educational outcomes studied were cumulative freshman year grade point average, a measure of self-perceived intellectual development during the fresh man year, and a measure of self-perceived personal develop ment as a freshman.