New attendance policies being tested in two large lecture classes at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville penalize students for missing class, as university leaders try ways to encourage attendance in hopes of boosting academic performance.
“What’s being tested is the impact of telling the students that it is important to attend each and every class,” UA’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, Sharon Gaber, wrote in an email. She called the policies being tested a “first trial” to be reviewed and then studied, with one question being whether the changes could be scaled to “the university level.”
“We’ve talked off and on about whether we want to have a mandatory freshman-sophomore attendance policy,” Gaber explained in an interview.
Currently, UA’s universitywide policy states “students have the responsibility to attend classes,” with instructors told that they must “provide a written policy on student attendance that is tied to course objectives and included in a course syllabus.”
In some smaller classes, attendance has been mandatory. But not so in large lecture classes with hundreds of students, like a general microbiology course taught by professor Timothy Kral.
“During a normal lecture class period, I would be missing, I would say 30 percent of the class, on average, which is a lot,” Kral said.
This semester, however, he put in place a new grading policy for the approximately 420 students enrolled in the microbiology course.
“Basically 20 percent of my grade is based on attendance,” Kral said. With just over 40 classes in the semester, “I guess you could say each class is about 0.5 percent of the total grade,” he added.
Students must use personalized remote transmitters, commonly referred to as “clickers,” to answer questions posed to the class during the lecture. Such technology has been used in other classes, but Kral said it was new to him and also to some students in the course.
These in-class questions offer Kral a way to take attendance and get feedback on whether students are catching on to what he’s teaching.
“The attendance is much better so far,” Kral said. He described the class as a sophomore-level course, though students from other class levels also have enrolled.
At least a few students said they don’t mind the policy.
“I actually kind of like it because it does make you come to class,” said Abby Handt, a sophomore nursing major.
Another student, senior kinesiology major Abbey Norman, said she thought the idea might be good for new college students.
“I’m a senior, so I’m kind of annoyed,” Norman said.
A general sociology class also is testing a new attendance policy and utilizing such “clicker” technology to have students participate in a mix of attendance polling and in-class quizzes. Attendance will count for about 23 percent of a student’s grade, Lori Holyfield, a professor in UA’s Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, wrote in an email.
Marcus Crede, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, has studied research on the effects of attending class.
“Forcing the students to come really benefits the weaker students the most,” Crede said.
In general, studies show that there seems to be a relationship between class attendance and success in a class, he said.
“Whether students come to class, the percentage of classes they attend was the single best predictor of how they did in that class,” Crede said.
Most universities give faculty members plenty of leeway to set their own attendance policies, he said, with relatively few universities enacting policies enforcing class attendance.
To study potential effects on learning, Crede looked at studies examining when going to class was required but was not part of a student’s final grade.
“On average, the grades didn’t go up a whole lot, but they did go up,” Crede said.
UA’s faculty senate is also considering a revision to the campuswide attendance policy. If adopted, the new policy would prohibit instructors from giving a zero on work that was missed when an absence is considered excusable.
The proposed update states that students with excused absences “must be given the opportunity to make up missed work (assignments, quizzes, and exams).” It would also prevent instructors from simply placing an increased emphasis on work the student does complete.
At a recent faculty senate meeting, some instructors groused about the difficulty in preparing alternate exams. In practice, many professors have policies that simply allow students to drop their lowest test grades. Further debate is expected at the next faculty senate meeting scheduled for Oct. 8.
The proposed policy also states that “class attendance should be treated as mandatory,” but the committee that drafted the policy wasn’t creating a new requirement, Kathleen Lehman, a member of the teaching council committee, told faculty members.
“Pretty much all we did was try to strengthen the language that places the responsibility for attendance and engagement on the student,” Lehman said at the meeting, explaining that the language is meant to communicate that students should treat going to class as mandatory “for their own learning and for their own engagement.”
Potential changes resulting from the pilot testing done in classes taught by Kral and Holyfield are “a separate issue,” Lehman told faculty members.
Before revising attendance policies to include mandatory requirements, discussion would take place with both the faculty senate and the associated student government, Gaber said. But she and university administrators have repeatedly said their goal is to boost graduation rates. About six out of 10 first-time, full-time freshmen earn degrees within six years, according to the latest data, while UA leaders have said their goal is by 2021 to have seven out of 10 students earning degrees within six years.
“In general, everybody hates things that are mandatory. But if it helps us, it might be a good thing,” Gaber said.