Teaching Thursday: Attendance

One the great challenges I’ve faced in the last two years has been student attendance. This semester, it has come to a head with attendance in my introductory level history class being under 50% on a regular basis. For this class, History 101: Western Civilization I, attendance is important because almost all work is done during class time.

Low attendance has long represented one of the “wicked problems” of academia. Not only are the roots of low attendance difficult to pinpoint, but many of the common solutions align poorly with the problem. In other words, there are ways to encourage students to attend, but many of the solutions produce new problems that are at as significant as the problems that they intend to solve.

A senior colleague of mine once suggested that we simply teach the students who attend rather than those who we wish would attend. This feels like a practical way forward, but also a cop out.

So far, I’ve considered a few ways to encourage attendance.

First, I have a little lecture that I give about three times per semester where I simply tell the students: “Come to fucking class.” I tell them absurdist tales of students who buy tickets of movies or sportsball games, but who don’t go. I tell them tales of students who buy dinners and leave the table before eating them and people who buy expensive cars but never pick them up from the lot. This has the benefit of shock value, but if this semester is any indication, appears not to motivate action.

Second, I’ve slowly started to add graded in-class assignments that reward students who attend and penalize students who don’t attend. The downside of this is that they are indiscriminate and penalize a student who misses class because of a crisis the same way that they penalize a student who can’t be bothered to show. On the other hand, allowing students with “legitimate” excuses to take quizzes that they miss in class constitutes the kind of “cop shit” that most professors would rather avoid. And it can quickly become a logistical nightmare.

After all, students who miss class are often students who have complicated lives, come from non-tradition backgrounds, or are struggling to adapt to college life. In other words, a meaningful percentage of students who do not attend class are not attending class for a meaningful reason.

Third, I’ve started to think about a plan where if 75% of the class attends, everyone gets an attendance bonus. This protects students who don’t attend for a legitimate reason and prevents me from having to resort to “cop shit” by trying to assess whether a student has a legitimate absence or not.

The problem with this, of course, is that it effectively penalizes people who come to class on days when it is hard to come to class (inclement weather, after a long weekend, during the nicest days of spring, and so on). If I rewarded only the students who attended on difficult days (and all the students when 75% attends) that creates a system where students with more complicated lives get penalized along side students who just chose not to attend.

My current solution in my History 101: Western Civilization I class is not ideal. Most of in-class work is group centered. After attendance dipped dramatically immediately before and after spring break, I decided to reorganize the groups and to create two groups with students who attend regularly and a “super group” for students who struggle to attend. The super group with about 50% bigger than the other groups ensuring that, at least, there are enough students attending class on any given day to make progress on the assignment. It also allowed me to work with the super group to fill in gaps for things that they missed when you didn’t attend. The other two groups, being filled with more conscientious students are performing markedly better than the super group, but they also require less attention at this stage of the semester.

In any event, as my summer research leave looms, I’m thinking more and more about how to create ways to deal with the unevenness of attendance in my classes.