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2. Teaching Practices
2.4. Knowing Your Students
Improving Attendance
As first-year students learn to handle the new-found freedom of college life, many experiment with skipping classes. Some may inaccurately view the lecture as a repetition of the text and perceive attendance as optional. Others may sleep through class or work on other assignments during that time because poor study and time management habits cause them to fall behind. Faculty members who report concerns about drops in attendance, particularly in the large lectures, offer some strategies to keep students in class regularly.
Be explicit about the importance of attending class. If you introduce information in lecture which is not in the book, be sure to tell students. If you provide alternative examples to the ones in the text or other ways of approaching the material, tell them. If your exam draws on both the book and lectures, tell them. By presenting novel information that is not in the book and highlighting when you do, students can more directly see the role of attending class in their learning.
Structure your course in a way that makes students accountable for attendance. Some faculty give regular assignments to turn in and/or short quizzes to assure attendance (some as short as one multiple choice question).
Start class on time so that students understand the importance of promptness. End class on time as well to show that you understand and respect their time constraints. It is easy to forget how much students need time to get to class in another part of campus.
In lectures ask students lots of questions during class. In addition to increasing active engagement in learning, the answers provide you with vital information about the range of student knowledge and ongoing comprehension. If students have difficulty with note-taking, do an example where you ask students not to take notes while you work through the example step-by-step on the board. Instead, give them 5 minutes to take down notes after the example has been discussed. Students are often so busy taking notes that they don't process the information and don't realize what they don't understand until they sit down to do a homework assignment - when it's too late to ask you questions.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
