Student Attendance

Stephen Kinsella has some interesting thoughts on his blog about student attendance. Below are the references from the paper he cites which include some interesting stuff and i add another one- we will be doing research here on this over the next couple of years.

Barrett, R., Rainer, A. and Marczyk, O. (2007) “Managed Learning Environments and an Attendance Crisis?“, The Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 5(1), pp. 1-10

Burd, E. and Hodgson, B. (2006) “Attendance and Attainment: A Five Year Study“, Innovation in Teaching And Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5(2)

Clay, T. and Breslow, L. (2006) “Why Students Don’t Attend Class“, MIT Faculty Newsletter, XVIII(4)

Clearly-Holdforth, J. (2007) “Student non-attendance in higher education. A phenomenon of student apathy or poor pedagogy?“, DIT Level 3, 5

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/papers/twerp_820.pdf

One view of low attendance (aside from the usual versions which cite either bad students, bad lecturers or both) is that there is insufficient differentiation between offerings at higher level. Purely anecdotallly from my own experience as a lecturer, there is a cohort of students who would happily never set foot on a college campus for anything other than a two-week cramming session if they could avoid it. Many of these students simply cant or wont take the financial hit from not working in paid employment and would never consider borrowing to finance their degree. Another group really want to buy in to their college and practically live in it for the four years. Both groups would benefit from more differentiation of offerings and if the university system is flexible enough we should see options developing that would suit school leavers who want to work while building up credits and other options developing that would suit students who are desperate to make the grade to the elite world graduate schools and therefore want to accelerate their module options by taking enhanced hours on campus, as well as moves to develop the whole college experience for students including internships etc.,

Modularisation will resolve some of this as students can stagger their degree more and, in many cases, embed evening courses and so on. If attendances are declining at traditional lecture formats, more flexibility of this nature seems a likely route. As someone who took a distance masters in philosophy (still completing some) while i was working on a very hectic job, I was extremely grateful for the flexibility of the format and it mellowed me out from thinking that such courses lowered the standards in higher education. They simply provide more choice and we should think more about these as options where students are clearly signalling that they do not want the traditional format. The market will then decide how much they value the qualifications.