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Appreciative Advising Inventory (AAI)

The Appreciative Advising Inventory (AAI) was developed by a consortium of academic advisers to help students set in motion the Discover phase of AA. This inventory helps both students and advisers better understand the personal assets they bring with them to college, including their internal and external developmental resources. The AAI is developed based on the premises of the 40 Developmental Assets developed by the Search Institute (2006)* and the literature on academic hope (Chang, 1998; Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001; Snyder, Feldman, Shorey, & Rand, 2002; Snyder, Harris et al., 1991; Snyder, Shoret et al., 2002).

The Appreciative Advising Revolution (2008) describes in details how the AAI has been used and how you can employ it at your institution. We are offering a PDF of the instrument here free of charge so that you can experiment with Appreciative Advising on your own campus. Advisers can use the AAI in a variety of ways to enhance the effectiveness of their advising sessions. For example, they may ask students to complete the AAI before the advising session and bring their results to the next appointment. Alternatively, they may request that students fill out the AAI during the advising meeting and debrief the responses as part of the session (ideally after the Disarm phase and after some initial rapport has been built via questioning).

Appreciative Advising Inventory

Below the AA Inventory, we also offer a helpful chart that divides the inventory questions into subcategories reflecting the constructs of the questions and indicating whether the asset is internal (i.e., dependent on the student’s beliefs and attitudes) or external (i.e., dependent on the student’s environment or relationships). For each subcategory, we have provided a list of sample Discover questions that advisers can ask students based on their answers to the AAI items.

Appreciative Advising Inventory Questions

The AAI development team members are Scott Amundsen, Jenny Bloom, Cathy Buyarski, Phil Christman, Amanda Cuevas, Linda Evans, Ye He, Bryant Hutson, Joe Murray, Claire Robinson, and Kaye Woodward. They have each used the AAI with great success at their home campuses.

* The Developmental Assets® are used with permission by Search Institute. ®Copyright © 1997, 2006 Search Institute, 615 First Avenue NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413; to learn more about Developmental Assets and to view the original framework, visit www.search-institute.org. All rights reserved.