We all know that attendance is linked to academic performance, right? Better attendance typically means higher grades, and lower attendance/higher rates of absenteeism is linked to lower academic performance? This is so well known in academic circles that many university professors include the connection between attendance and academic performance in their introductory lectures or in their syllabi.
Yet, in the Covid era, many have also become increasingly aware of impossibility of perfect attendance in many cases. Between illness and caregiving responsibilities and work commitments and financial hardship, there are lots of students for whom attendance in class is not the top priority. Universal design for learning suggests that we should design our courses so that students who face barriers to attendance don’t face additional barriers to academic success. After all, mere attendance shouldn’t be a pedagogical aim for most of us.
The temptation to make attendance part of assessment is real. Every instructor wants to encourage attendance in general. We want our students to do well, and we want them to get the most out of our classes. We want to encourage attendance because it is so hard to lecture to an empty room and impossible to run a lab or an engaging activity with too few students. We need to strike a balance between accommodating students who can’t attend, encouraging attendance for those who can, and building pathways to success in the course for both sets of students.
One worry is that attendance is an easily measurable proxy for learning outcomes, and it seems to have a predictive quality to it. We know as the semester progresses whether attendance is waning, and we try to adjust in the hopes of achieving better learning outcomes. Educators at all levels should care about learning outcomes, but should we therefore care about attendance? What if we’re tracking the wrong variable, for the wrong reasons?
The answer, it would seem, is mixed. Yes, there are plenty of studies that show high attendance rates correspond, in general, with high achievement rates, and high rates of absenteeism correspond, in general, with lower academic achievement rates.
But many studies suggest only a weak statistical connection between attendance and learning outcomes or academic results, and there are a lot of hints in the research that suggest that the causal connection is elsewhere.
One reason to think that attendance itself is not doing the work comes from this study showing that students who attend their undergraduate lectures achieve the highest test scores, but the students most likely to attend lectures are also students who had the highest admission scores to university. That is, students who already have a record of doing well academically are more likely to attend class. That strong students attend class and do well isn’t surprising. But what about the students who aren’t attending class, or who don’t have a record of high achievement? What about the students who can’t attend class, now, regardless of what their prior record suggests?
We should (and do!) worry about the reasons why students are present or absent from class. There is a very real worry that we may be systematically disadvantaging students who cannot attend class. In the past, students have made unprompted disclosures to me for missing class when: a war broke out in their home country; they were caring for a family member in hospital; their chronic illness flared up; they were in mental health crisis; they had to be in court; their caregiving responsibilities conflicted with class; they were offered a work shift that they couldn’t afford to turn down; they couldn’t afford bus fare to come to campus for every class. I’ve lost count of the number of hospital selfies and medical charts I’ve received (though, I wish the answer were zero). All of these reasons are legitimate and worthy of accommodation in my books, although very few of them qualify for official accommodation within the university’s policy. And none of these are explanations that students should feel the need to disclose to their professor.
Universal Design for Learning proposes that we consider these students at the syllabus design stage, before the course starts. If the syllabus is designed for the widest possible range of students in mind, the course will be accessible to them without anyone having to disclose their reason for absence.
This study suggests that mere attendance is only weakly correlated with exam performance, but levels of cognitive engagement (to a certain extent) and behavioural engagement (to a greater extent) are highly correlated with exam performance. Büchele argues that what matters most is the level of engagement when students attend class. Cognitive engagement means getting the students thinking in class. Examples of cognitive engagement include using a ‘flipped classroom‘, student activities that make comparisons or connections such as mind mapping, and various types of experiential learning. But in a large class, and on a large scale, those can be hard to achieve. The good news about Büchele’s study is that even (mere) behavioural engagement has a positive impact on exam performance. Behavioural engagement is stimulus-response type of engagement including classroom response activities (such as Poll Everywhere or Kahoot).
Finally, this study finds that although attendance positively correlates with student performance, attendance policies do not have a significant effect on attendance. My take away is that the attendance policy is not going to do the work of motivating students to attend on its own. After all, there is good reason to think that student absences are experienced with regret, or chosen for good reason. Awarding marks for attendance or penalizing non-attendance with mark deductions might artificially widen the performance gap between those who attend and those who are absent. But it won’t have changed how much the students have learned.
A better strategy is to acknowledge the reality of absenteeism and try to build pathways to engagement for students who cannot attend. Perhaps an asynchronous discussion board or online mind-mapping activity for those who cannot attend with the rest of the class, in parallel with in-person discussions and synchronous mind-mapping activities for those who are able to attend.
A final note about the pandemic’s impact on attendance and burnout. Rates of student absenteeism are much higher than they ever have been. And for some portions of the pandemic, even the correlation between attendance and academic performance has dropped off. Many people reported much lower than usual academic performance, irrespective of attendance rates. Pandemic life is hard on all of us, and it is especially demoralizing to find that engagement strategies that worked in the past are no longer as effective.
This brief survey of the literature on attendance and performance suggests that engagement rather than attendance is the thing we should all be tracking. But, of course, engagement is very hard to track. It is much more difficult to track than attendance. As higher ed goes through rapid changes brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, learning outcomes remain the end point aim for.