A couple of articles have been bouncing around in my mind, both of which touch on issues I’m sure most educators are thinking about, but where I feel like the most interesting part of the conversation starts at the point the articles end.
The first article from Inside Higher Ed, New Data Shows Attendance Fosters Student Success, initially caught my attention because of the sheer obviousness of the statement and curiosity about what more there might be to say about this. If my class sessions don’t foster student success, what am I even doing! The article, of course, is more focused on the tension between how faculty encourage students to attend (knowing that it will help them be successful) and students’ desire for flexibility in their schedules and dislike of attendance factoring into their grades (as compared to just their ultimate ability to demonstrate what they have learned).
From the article: “A professor at Colorado State University surveyed 175 of his students in 2023 and found that 37 percent said they regularly did not attend class because of physical illness, mental health concerns, a lack of interest or engagement, or simply because it wasn’t a requirement.” I find that list interesting, because the first two items are very different from the second two items. Other quotes mention transportation issues and class conflicting with work schedules. This range of reasons that students do not attend creates challenges for faculty, particularly the evidence that (possibly particularly when compared to the many classes that do require attendance), a lack of a grade-linked attendance policy contributes to students deciding not to attend, when compared to their other interests and priorities.
I appreciate that the article wraps up by basically advocating for teaching in a manner that makes evident to students the value of being present. That’s certainly been my strategy and for a good number of students, it can be effective. But it can also take time for students to make that connection, and first-year students in particular (in my experience) can find themselves only realizing what they have missed by not being in class when they are in a very hard spot for catching up. Having an attendance grade makes it easy to intervene when a student is heading down that road. I’m working on finding ways to have those interventions (e.g. email messages to students who aren’t keeping up with the activities that are supposed to be happening in class) but there always seem to be students who do the math and decide that formative work that’s only worth 5-10% of the overall grade is optional as compared to other priorities. It’s a conversation I keep coming back to with colleagues – I don’t judge students for having to balance priorities, but how do we help students have a more accurate sense of the cost-benefit tradeoff of attending class?
The other article, Meet Students Where They Are? Maybe Not, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, follows the title with “Lax standards will void the value of a college education.” A telling sentence: “If the college degree continues to lose its traditional function of signaling competency and grit, the outlook will be grim for a higher-ed system largely financed by student debt.”
The inclusion of “grit” in addition to competency is interesting there. In some ways, I agree – can you manage your time and priorities to be able to learn, are you willing to make use of the help available to you in order to succeed, etc. But if my competency assessments are the same, what is the merit in (per the previous article) assigning a specific point deduction to an absence if the student can demonstrate they’ve made up for the missed learning activities on their own time? Doesn’t the student juggling a 30-40 hour a week off-campus job as well as a full time course load show at least as much grit as the classmate with a 10-hour a week work student position or no job at all – even if I show some leniency around attendance?
The article states that “a third of professors in our survey admit to watering down their courses in recent years; we suspect that many more will have to dilute their syllabi in the future”. Perhaps that is accurate, in the way that the sentence asks to be read, and that would be unfortunate. But I’ve also had a lot of productive conversations with faculty at many institutions (not just my own) about the balance between number of topics covered versus perhaps cutting back on some content in order to engage more deeply in the topics we do cover. Some of my best class sessions have been when I realized that my students were trying to understand a hard concept and, rather than pressing on with the next topic, I gave them space to really apply their critical thinking skills and work together to make sure everyone in the class reached a solid level of understanding – even if it meant looking at the class plans for the rest of the week and figuring out what to prune. Are we watering things down, or are we identifying that facts-conveyed may not be the best way to measure the learning value of a course? I’m also not sure that a syllabus level assessment is the best way to look at this, compared to a curriculum level assessment. If students are coming in with different preparation, why wouldn’t we change how our introductory courses operate? If, in turn, the structure of the curriculum can shift as students move through it, and we can still graduate students who depart with the needed competencies – rather than dropping or failing out – it seems like a bit of early “watering down” was all for the good.
I understand that this looks different at different institutions, and I do think the article has a good point that many institutions’ weak methods for assessing the quality of instruction incentivize making students happy (particularly for untenured faculty), so we should find better methods for instructional assessment. But, reading these two articles together in close succession, I think it is an overreaction to suggest that we should stop considering who are students are as they enter the college and the classroom and think about how we can continue to adjust our instruction to meet that reality.
