If Attendance Policies are Bad, What about Grading Class Participation?
The other day, I argued that attendance policies are problematic, in part because tracking attendance in large classes can be difficult and in part because mandating attendance isn’t particularly motivational for students. What about class participation policies? Is mandating participation any better than mandating attendance?
Yes, I think it is. As Brian Croxall wrote in his recent ProfHacker post on grading class participation, his learning objectives for his students encompass more than what can be demonstrated in their writing. He wants his students to be able to analyze a text and craft oral arguments about the text. In that setting it makes sense that he would find ways to evaluate this component of his students’ learning.
Here’s another reason to include class participation in your students’ grades: By participating in meaningful ways in a class, a student enhances the learning experience of the other students in the class. This is particularly true in discussion-based courses. In those courses, if there aren’t any students participating, there’s nothing happening during class time! However, just about any class can be a better learning experience for students when the students are contributing to each others’ learning. I think it’s appropriate to motivate students to contribute in meaningful ways by assigning a grade to class participation.
Another reason for grading class participation is that participating in class is good for the student doing the participating. I’m okay with using a portion of a student’s course grade to motivate behaviors in that student that will benefit his or her learning. That’s a big reason I count homework assignments in my math courses as part of students’ grades. I’m less concerned about evaluating their performance on those homework problems and more concerned with motivating them to engage in a behavior–trying their hand at math problems–that will help them learn.
But what about attendance policies? Doesn’t counting attendance as part of a course grade motivate students to engage in an activity that will help them learn? Yes, to some degree, but I question how useful just showing up is to a student’s learning. Participating in discussion, completing homework problems–these are clearly beneficial to learning. Warming a seat isn’t necessary helpful.
Not counting attendance also helps keep me responsible for my contributions to my students’ learning: If my class sessions are not useful enough to students that the students start skipping, then perhaps I need to rethink what I’m doing during class! It’s my responsibility to make class time useful to students. It’s their responsibility to show up and take advantage of that time. (See Ira Socol’s comment on my earlier post for more on this idea.)
I’ll finish this post by highlighting something embedded in some of the comments on Brian Croxall’s post, those by Chronicle readers rswolff, ksledge, and amyshuffelton. All three of them outlined ways they give their students options for earning class participation credit–contributing to class discussions, commenting online, etc. In each case, an individual student didn’t need to participate in all the ways available to earn full credit, giving students some flexibility in how they participated.
I think this is important for two reasons: (1) it acknowledges that one can contribute to a shared learning environment in more than one way, and (2) students are often motivated to engage in meaningful learning activities when they have some degree of control over how they engage in those activities. Given students some choices is one way to motivate them!
Image: “Raise your hand if you’re a geek” by Flickr user colorblindPICASO / Creative Commons licensed