I always follow threads on attendance really carefully because I struggle with it every semester. It seems to me that keeping track of attendance is a lot of work for me that could be better spent improving other aspects of instruction. Especially when I use so much creative energy trying to come up with ways to make it meaningful, fair, etc. Also, I continually struggle to make the points towards the final grade enticing, but not so important that it seems coercive. I also try to keep in mind the old research finding about how when people wrote an essay about something they disagreed with for an absurdly small sum of money and changed their minds, whereas if there were large sums involved they knew that they only wrote it for the money and there was little change in attitude. The person who commented about intrinsic/extrinsic motovation had a great point, but I'd go even further and suggest that we may be talking about cognitive dissonance issues - I even looked some of this up in my old social psych text. I also have a less pure motive - I want to encourage people who will like class when they get there to come, but I don't want to force those who will hate it no matter what I do to come by making it too "expensive" to miss.
For awhile I decided that I wasn't going to keep track of attendance for all the reasons that have been mentioned in this list. When I was an undergrad there were no attendance grades - only participation grades because we had small classes. Small class size also made it easy to for teachers to show the link between attendance, participation, and test performance. (Actually, this school was so small that in some classes people didn't skip - or else we coordinated skipping carefully among ourselves because there was always the concern that EVERYONE would skip one day and God help us all if that happened! We knew our 'freedom' to cut class would evaporate the moment that happened) In big classes at the suitcase college where I teach there isn't that kind of communication among students, and I'm not altogether certain that they'd make the connection anyway, given the correlational nature of this data (I said that badly, but I hope everyone understands what I mean - I'm talking about rank ordering rather than an absolute pass/fail kind of relationship) and how many of them there are and how many combinations of grades are possible, etc. The other thing that I learned when I tried this approach was that the blame for achievement always fell on me when there was no attendance policy. It was as though - in their minds - if they didn't get the lecture because they didn't go to class, then the material hadn't actually been presented. And any student who never came, actually did do well, and happened to be there the day that the evaluations were done seemed to take it as a personal failure on the part of the instructor that they had managed to do well even though they didn't attend. I think this may be related to school culture, but I haven't forgotten being dinged that way. So I have an attendance policy based on all these things , but save my sanity by saying that I won't excuse any absence or allow any make ups unless they are excused by the University. So far I haven't gotten any irate phone calls from the dean becaus the policy has worked as it was intended to: people don't ask the University to excuse their absence unless it's a real excuse, and I have someone else to do the leg work for me. I also accept a Dr. or Health center note, but not one from Mom (I'm not kidding - students have really asked me to). I make a big deal the first day of class about how embarrassing it is for both of us to be asking for notes from different people and tell people that unless they want me to ask them for samples of vomit with notarized statements from medical professionals certifying that it belongs to them - I don't care whether they skip or decide it's easier to just show up - as long as they are responsible about it. But it's still cumbersome. I hope someone does it better so that they can tell me how. But whenever I think about dropping my attendance policies and letting the students make mature decisions on their own I remind myself that their frontal lobes are not yet fully developed and that they need me to help them make good decisions about this. --Cindy M.
Cynthia Bainbridge Mullis, Ph.D.
Asstistant Professor of Psychology
University of Wisconsin - Whitewater
800 West Main Street
Whitewater, WI 53190
(262) 472-3037 Office
(262) 472-1863
Office Hours - Fall 2002
Mon 10:00-12:00
Tues/Thurs 12:30-2:00
Or by appointment
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