Simon Cullen + Danny Oppenheimer help us rethink student attendance policies toward deeper engagement and learning on episode 591 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

There’s a lot of evidence that coming to class is one of the best things a student can do to facilitate their learning and performance in class.

You can make students attend, and most faculty do. They set attendance as mandatory. And then students attend and they learn because they attend. But they also hate you, and they hate the subject and they hate everything to do with the class.

If you give people choices, sometimes they make bad choices. Scaffolding choices can help people make choices that actually align with their preferences more effectively.

Students love being treated like adults. They love having choice. Everybody loves having choice. People don’t like other people telling them what to do.

In some sense students have a preference to attend class. And in some sense they have a preference to not attend class. Those preferences can coexist in some way.