Incentivizing Attendance

It’s widely known that showing up doesn’t ensure students will succeed in a course, but it’s a great place to start. However, post-pandemic, students are vocal about their desire for professors to adopt a more flexible approach to attendance. In fall 2021, the University of Arizona’s student paper ran an opinion essay with the headline “Why Is Attendance Still Mandatory in 2021?” Kerry-Ann Barrett, in her literature review, “An Examination of Informed and Incentivized Attendance,” in January 2021, reminds us that “mandatory attendance policies when enforced may have implications for retention rates” and that these policies “may also demotivate students to attend as it goes against their self-directedness.” Some argue that attendance policies don’t measure participation or engagement, but instead become one more obstacle to navigate. Attendance incentives are now gaining interest and popularity in higher education. 

Attendance incentives reward attendance rather than punish absence. Students appreciate when there's some kind of reason or meaning for attending class. Many students recognize that they enjoy a class more and get more out of a class when they attend, but they're human beings and they often have a lot going on and sometimes if there's no clear incentive to go, it feels better to just sleep in or make a different choice. Below are two examples of attendance incentives and their outcomes presented in a Chronicle of Higher Education webinar entitled “The Faculty’s Place in Student Success,” on June 7, 2022.

Bridgette Martin Hard, PhD, Associate Professor of the Practice of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University

Bridgette Hard avoids penalizing students for missing a class, but instead creates an interesting incentive that makes going to class more appealing. In her Introduction to Psychology class, Dr. Hard has an attendance incentive that awards points if you attended a certain percentage of lectures in the class, and those points allow the cumulative final exam to be optional. Optional means students can take the exam to replace a lower exam grade from earlier in the term if they want a second chance to learn the content and do a better job. Last year, in her first year trying this new incentive, Bridgette found it to be highly motivating for students. Students don’t have to go to every class; they can miss three classes which allows them to make adult choices and see how they turn out in a safe environment. Dr. Hard believes this also gives students a chance to show resilience by re-learning and doing better.

Laurette Blakley Foster, EdD, Professor of Mathematics, Prairie View A&M University

Students receive points for attending class and those points accumulate and can be used to replace one assessment at the end of the semester. Dr. Foster found that most students want the points because at the end of the class they might just need them. Her class attendance increased, and so did her class average. Foster also incorporates reflection in her teaching. After each assessment, students briefly reflect on what they did to prepare for that assessment. Laurette believes that school is a place for students to learn to do what they need to do in order to be successful. The reflections provide that required self-examination and impress upon students what is within their control to change.

For more perspective on attendance in higher education classes, read The Attendance Conundrum by Beckie Supiano, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 20, 2022 and review the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Teaching & Learning website.

“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”

– B.B. King