Newsletter March 2024: Attendance in teaching

By Lotte Dyhrberg O'Neill, ldo@sdu.dk, 3/22/2024

Why don’t they show up?

Recently, SDU UP facilitated a discussion among a group of heads of studies about absence in teaching. The topic originally arose due to challenges experienced with cheating with attendance registration. Absence in university education is multifactorial, and the reasons for absence can be broadly categorized into reasons that are either teaching-related or reasons stemming from students’ personal circumstances.^1-4 According to the students, the teaching-related reasons for absence include factors such as lack of social belonging within the study, the teaching (materials, methods, lecturers, topics, availability of online material), the university's expectations and politics, and poor scheduling. More personal reasons for absence can include the students’ financial situations, work, demographics, psychological factors, illness, social activities, fatigue/sleep, transportation, family, weather, and sports. The teaching-related reasons for absence can be addressed if the framework of the institution/programme allows for it. Given the any potential reasons for absence, it is advisable to ask the students why they stay away from teaching before deciding which development initiative is the most meaningful in the local context. Furthermore, it is important for the education and the academic environments to consider their own expectations regarding student attendance and existing attendance policies. Formal attendance requirements may positively impact attendance, but the question is if attendance requirements at the same time infantilize students, and if the price in the form of disregard of the students' academic freedom and lack of development of agency and autonomy is not far too high? ^1,5

Lectures and attendance

As mentioned above, the choice of teaching method, for example, may have an impact on attendance and engagement in teaching. The lecture is still one of the most common and most held forms of teaching at universities, and there are several positive aspects of the lecture as a teaching method. During a lecture, the lecturer can, for example, show his/her own enthusiasm for the subject, present illustrative examples, help students integrate new knowledge, cover content in a time-efficient way, explain difficult content, and serve as a role model for expert reasoning in a specific topic. And lectures are 'effective' from an economic point of view. This is all very fine. The problem simply is that lectures have a boring tendency to be associated with low attendance (often <50%), low engagement, poorer learning, and slower learning. ^6-10 Students learn more by independent text reading or via collaborative problem solving than by listening to even the most skilled and experienced lecturers. ^6-9 Therefore, it may be an expression of due diligence and responsibility for their own learning if students opt out of attending lectures in favor of independent studies.⁶ Fortunately, it is possible to incorporate learning activities that encourage critical thinking or problem solving – also in very large groups and in auditorium contexts. However, this requires a fundamental confrontation with the mistaken assumption that what is 'transmitted' in lectures is learned 1:1 by the students - also known as 'the transmission fallacy',⁶ and an acknowledgment that the lecturer's noblest task is not to 'cover content' on behalf of the students, but instead to provide sufficient space for learning activities that better support the students' independent preparation and learning.

What can be done?

To change a (lack of) attendance culture, it is necessary to involve colleagues. Therefore, we have collected some reflection material (the boxes Autonomy, Reasons for absence, Teaching Methods on the right). This material can be used by groups of colleagues and with regards to a specific study programme to discuss how to create an attendance culture that supports participation and learning.

References

1. Menendez Alvarez-Hevia D, Lord J, Naylor S. Why don’t they attend? Factors that influence the attendance of HE students of education. Journal of Further and Higher Education. 2021;45(8):1061-75.
2. Oldfield J, Rodwell J, Curry L, Marks G. A face in a sea of faces: exploring university students’ reasons for non-attendance to teaching sessions. Journal of Further and Higher Education. 2019;43(4):443-52.
3. Moores E, Birdi GK, Higson HE. Determinants of university students’ attendance. Educational Research. 2019;61(4):371-87.
4. Sloan D, Manns H, Mellor A, Jeffries M. Factors influencing student non-attendance at formal teaching sessions. Studies in Higher Education. 2020;45(11):2203-16.
5. Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). Brussels, Belgium; 2015.
6. Schmidt HG, Wagener SL, Smeets GA, Keemink LM, van Der Molen HT. On the use and misuse of lectures in higher education. Health Professions Education. 2015;1(1):12-8.
7. Deslauriers L, McCarty LS, Miller K, Callaghan K, Kestin G. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2019;116(39):19251-7.
8. Crouch CH, Mazur E. Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics. 2001;69(9):970-7.
9. Deslauriers L, Schelew E, Wieman C. Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science. 2011;332(6031):862-4.
10. Schmidt HG, Cohen-Schotanus J, Van Der Molen HT, Splinter TA, Bulte J, Holdrinet R, et al. Learning more by being taught less: a “time-for-self-study” theory explaining curricular effects on graduation rate and study duration. Higher Education. 2010;60:287-300.