There was a bit of a stink not long ago about some Harvard research on student lecture attendance that filmed students without their consent. There’s a bit more about it here http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/taking-attendance
Well. the results are out and despite the fuss they don’t tell us anything new.
- Numbers start high, and fall away
- Guest speakers boost attendance
- Attendance marks boost attendance
- Some lecturers see bigger falls than others, but they don’t know why (teaching quality perhaps?)
- It looks like the presence, or not, of recorded lectures doesn’t have much effect on attendance.
- Students don’t like coming to Friday lectures
- Student who attended lectures were also more likely to visit the unit online site
- In some units students who attended also watched the videos in some they did not.
So the usual garbage, which doesn’t provide enough information to draw any real conclusions.
It doesn’t change my position, which is:
- engaged students engage (and attend).
- engaged student do well (they do better with good teachers)
- students like coming to lectures delivered by good, interesting lecturers,
- if you want to improve attendance, act to improve engagement (i.e. improve your teaching),
- you can use tricks to artificially inflate your (ego) attendance but it doesn’t impact on student outcomes,
- there may be a case for the delayed release of recordings and having attendance marks in first year to help establish more active behaviors (can someone please research this for me).
- if you see a marked decrease in attendance related to the availability of recorded lectures, it may be a sign that you need to improve your face to face sessions.
- no one shows up to 8 am and Friday afternoon lectures, so we need a different solution,
- students often have valid reasons for non attendance and like having the backup of recorded lectures (and no kittens get drowned if you provide them),
- the number of people viewing recorded lectures is useless unless you know:
- the time of the day
- the day of the week
- the session style – chalk and talk, workshop, interactive lecture (and a description of what you mean), e.t.c)
- how well the teacher delivers the session
- the student opinion of the lecturer
- the charisma of the lecturer
- the initial student attitude toward the course
- the importance of the unit in the context of the course
- the quality and quantity of other course material
- insert your own experience/research based factor.