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Ethical and Effective Attendance Policies

Facilitators: Elliott Hawley (they/them) and Andrew Lucchesi (he/they)

March 8th, 2024

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A Note on Recording

We will record this workshop for later publication
Everything in the written chat will be included with the recording

We will render chat comments anonymous

If you want to write comments in the chat, but you do not want to be included in the published recording of the workshop, send them privately to Andrew or Elliott

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Workshop Preview

Overview of Workshop
Introductions in the chat
Intention setting
Topic 1: Being a Disabled College Student
Topic 2: Attendance from a Faculty Perspective
Discussion: Exploring Attendance Scenarios
Topic 3: Attendance through a Universal Design Perspective
Next steps

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Introductions

Write it in the chat:

What’s your discipline?
How long have you been teaching?

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Intention Setting

What do you want to know from this workshop?

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Mandatory Attendance Policies

Absences are counted and tracked

Sometimes there is a distinction between excused and unexcused absences

Absences affect the grade or the ability to pass through penalties

There may be systems of make-up work

One policy applies to all students

We manage difficulties on a case-by-case basis

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Andrew:

I want to take a minute to define our central focus, the mandatory attendance policy. These are policies written into the syllabus that have a few features.

First, they set limits on the amount of absences students may have in the class before they receive a penalty.

In some cases, there are distinctions between excused and unexcused absences.

In these systems, missing class affects the grade in some way, either by losing points or failing the course when they’ve missed too many classes.

In some cases, there might be systems in place to allow students to make up for absences.

Ultimately, there is one policy for the whole class, but sometimes you might work with students on a case-by-case basis to find workarounds.

I will now pass things off to Elliott to talk about student experiences

1m

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Topic 1: Learning with a Disability

Student A -

3 allowed absences
Disability makes sleeping difficult – has a hard time going to sleep and waking up
Feels that attendance policies are good for accountability

“I think that if there existed some structural change we could make to the whole system that would benefit every single person, that would be great, but I don't know how you'd do that without taking away some sense of accountability, which I think attendance policies are good for maintaining.”

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Topic 1: Learning with a Disability

Student B:

This student’s disability made attending class difficult, and there were additional policies that made it difficult to make up points when unavoidably missing class.

“I had a professor who only let me miss 3 additional classes from their original policy (total of 6 excused absences). I happened to have a bad flare that quarter and was not able to rest enough to recover until the end of the quarter. Also, when I did miss class, if there was a pop quiz that day (can we please kill pop quizzes, please), I had to make it up with a more challenging response to a prompt due at midnight same day.”

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Topic 1: Learning with a Disability

Student C:

Has a disability that makes it extremely difficult to be on time.
Struggles with attendance policies that take into account “lateness”.
Did not know about relevant DAC accommodations and relied on informal agreements

“[It was unhelpful to lose] all attendance points for even a slight infraction, even if the classes [were] on opposite sides of campus, which I have to imagine is even worse for people with physical disabilities.” �[A] good policy was taking attendance based on a short quiz or check in or answer to a daily question, submitted at the end of class via paper with your name on it. Being submitted at the end meant I could still get full attendance points even if I was a bit late.”

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Elliott - 2.5 min

Student C’s disability impacts their ability to be on time. They mentioned to me that they have never been able to be on time, despite years of trying and lots of different strategies for doing so. They are consistently a few minutes behind schedule. They found attendance policies that also considered tardiness to be punitive, as they rarely miss much of what has happened in those first few minutes and take an extreme penalty. They are not able to control their lateness, despite many strategies. They’ve even tried several different medications to try to ameliorate this, with little success.

They did not know about DAC accommodations that would be relevant in this situation (though they do have documentation and receive other accommodations) and has relied heavily on informal agreements by professors. They stated that some policies were good and helped them be successful in class, but others did not.

This situation is similar to those with physical disabilities who cannot traverse the campus quickly enough to get to class, especially if they only have 10 minutes. In an ideal world, their course schedule would accommodate for that, but this isn’t always possible. Having an attendance policy that does not take being on time into account removes the need for these special arrangements and informal agreements, reducing the potential workload of a professor and removing the burden of self-advocating from the student. Even when this is an official accommodation, taking the time to develop these exceptions, like Student B’s mention of special pop quizzes, means more time a professor has to put into a course.

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Topic 2: Faculty view of attendance

1. Attendance Policies Encourage Learning

Discussion-based classes
In-Class content that is vital to experience in real time
Flipped classroom and active learning

“the only way to access the content [of the lesson] is being in time and space [of the classroom] together”

“certain classes involve safety and risk management information before students run programming for the public, so it's vital that the students attend class and learn the information”

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Andrew

I spoke with several faculty from across the disciplines and drew out a few common threads about how they use attendance policies and how it affects their labor. One topic that came up alot was the ways attendance policies support student learning. Many faculty members rely on in-class discussion and active learning techniques to teach the content of the course. These components can’t easily be replicated through online asynchronous activities or recordings. As one faculty member explained about their dance-focused classes, “the only way to access the content of the lesson is being in the time and space of the classroom together.” Another, who works in an applied health and wellness field, explained that “certain classes involve safety and risk management information before students run programming for the public, so it’s vital that students attend class and learn the information.” Student-teacher interaction are vital to ensure students have mastery of this important material.

I think it is important to acknowledge the important learning that happens in a classroom and not minimize the difference between asynchronous online work and the live instructional activities we can do during the class time. It can be hard to envision other ways to teach the material for sure.

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Topic 2: Faculty view of attendance

2. Individual attention is time consuming

Taking and tracking attendance requires a coherent system
Communicating with students about attendance requires back and forth
Students can’t always advocate for their needs and rate their abilities to catch up
Individual make-up work demands new deadlines and rubrics

“My go-to for missed classes is to come up with an alternative assignment. Something somewhat formal that takes a good amount of labor. But that’s extra work for me and the student, and it doesn’t always work out.”

“Class size matters. If you have a small class you have the space to be flexible, which you can’t do with a 200 person class. What if we had workstudy support or something to help manage accommodations in these large classes?”

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Andrew:

One reality that comes along with mandatory attendance policies is that they bring a lot of labor. For one thing, the attendance policy needs to be set up in the syllabus and maintained throughout the class by taking and tracking absences. We need open lines of communication with students about their attendance record and the consequences of running afoul of the penalties. The most time-consuming aspects of managing attendance come when students are falling behind and we opt to help them catch up. This includes things like putting together lecture notes or other materials, offering special office hours, or creating special assignments, which add special deadlines and more work to grade and respond to the new assignments. Faculty members describe the challenge of doing this kind of individual attention to manage attendance issues.

One faculty member in the social sciences says “My go-to for missed classes is to come up with an alternative assignment. Something somewhat formal that takes a good amount of labor for the student. But that’s extra work for me and the student, and it doesn’t always work out.”

Another faculty member in the humanities points out that “Class size matters. If you have a small class, you have the space to be flexible, which you can’t do with a 200 person class.” They reflect on a possible solution to help manage the labor of offering individual make-up work, “What if we had workstudy support or something to help manage accommodations in these large classes?”

All of us would, I think, prefer to help students keep up with the class and avoid being hurt by missing class. Hurt both in the sense of falling behind in the material, which will hurt their grade when it’s time for a test or complex assignment. But also hurt by the penalties our attendance systems build in as consequences of too many absences.

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Topic 2: Faculty view of attendance

3. Labor of adjudication

Faculty are not trained to determine appropriate vs inappropriate absences

Medical notes
Work obligations
When do life issues justify missing a class?

Faculty are put into the position to judge someone’s life choices and moral habits, which is beyond their training as content experts

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Andrew:

Mandatory attendance policies often put us in a position to judge what absences are appropriate or inappropriate. There is a huge variation here. Some classes build in a lot of absences, but don’t distinguish between excused and non-excused. An absence is an absence. Others only have a small number of non-excused absences, and any absence at all needs to come with a valid excuse to avoid a penalty.

These policies put faculty in an awkward position to judge the life choices of our students. For one, when we talk about doctors notes or other proof of students’ inability to attend class, we are making judgements about student’s physical ability–how sick is sick enough? Do anxiety or chronic migranes constitute excused absence? What about a hangover, does that count? What about fatigue from working an overnight job cleaning office buildings? At what point do you draw the line between excused and non-excused absences?

This gets us into the position to judge student’s commitment to their education, their abilities to manage their lives, and even their moral values. It puts us into the position of judging them based on our perceived standards of what they will have to do in their future professional lives. I personally don’t feel qualified to make these judgements about physical ability or commitment to education. But these are the judgements we have to make when issues come up with student absences.

2m

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Discussion groups

Why is attendance important to your class?
What goes wrong if the attendance policy is not set up well?
What difference do you imagine your possible attendance policies would have for students, whether they are disabled or not?

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Sharing out

Everyone writes in the chat:

What came up in your conversation?

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Topic 3: Universal Design for Learning

Representation

Readings, lectures, videos, learn-by-doing activities

Action and Expression

Writing, speaking, quizzes, discussion

Engagement

How to sustain attention and interest
How to persist at learning
How to make choices about the class

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Action and Expression

Representation

Engagement

UDL

Andrew:

Let’s turn now to our final topic, Universal Design for Learning or UDL. UDL works by building courses in which there are multiple routes to student success. Students can build paths through the course that suit their abilities and needs. I should note that UDL is not an easy thing to accomplish, and we should try to achieve it in small steps.

UDL is often broken down into three components, representation, action and expression, and engagement. For each of these, the idea is to provide multiple ways in. For instance, multiple means of representation means providing lots of ways for students to learn the content of the course. You might provide readings, but also videos and other multimedia, you might lecture, but you also might include activities that teach the content. Action and expression refers to the things students do to participate in the class and the learning. Students might write responses, complete assignments, speak in class, take quizzes, or other activities. Allowing students opportunities to do any or all of these things increases the likelihood that students will find their way to some sort of success.

The final category is engagement. Engagement refers to decision making, persistence, and attention. This is where attendance policies come in. Students make decisions about how they engage with class–perhaps some speak up in class while others quietly take notes. Can both of these styles of engagement lead to student success? Perhaps some students come to class regularly and some work better with lecture slides and some other student’s notes. Is this a route to success? How do students get to exert control in their participation in the class?

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Example: Multiple Attendance Policies

Offer students two options for attendance policies, which they must commit to early in the course
Option 1: Mandatory Attendance Model

Limited number of absences
Penalty for exceeding it

Option 2: Extra-Credit Model

Students receive a passing grade by default
Attending class earns extra credit toward an A

85% chose the mandatory attendance policy

“Nontraditional students — particularly older ones with children or work commitments — appreciate having an attendance choice that allows them to manage conflicts that invariably arise in their busy lives without the risk of academic penalty. For example, students who know they are at risk of future, unplanned absences for work or personal reasons can select the optional policy without fear of being penalized if they can’t attend class.”

“Time to Make Your Mandatory-Attendance Policy Optional?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 Jan. 2019

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Andrew:

In the course of our research for this workshop, Elliott and I found a model of choice-focused attendance policies in the Chronicile of Higher Education from 2019. We will include this in the resource page we make after this workshop. In it, the writers designed their class to have two attendance policies. Students would decide early on in the class which policy they preferred, and they were not allowed to change their minds later on.

One model is your traditional attendance policy with a certain limit of allowed absences, then penalties after that. In this way, students’ grades are only influenced if they miss too many classes.

They also used an extra-credit model. In this one, students’ grade for the class are fixed at a certain level, for instance all the assignments add up to a B grade. Students get extra credit points for each class they attend, but no penalty for every class they miss. Within this system, there are no penalties or sudden failures, and students can choose more easily to miss classes if they need to.

Two interesting things came from this study. First, 85% of students chose the traditional attendance policy. This was surprising to me, since I assumed more students would want to avoid penalties for missed classes. However, as student 1 did in Elliott’s interviews, some students clearly value the traditional structure.

What really stood out to me was their observation that the new system worked particularly well for what they call nontraditional students. I’ll quote them: “Nontraditional students — particularly older ones with children or work commitments — appreciate having an attendance choice that allows them to manage conflicts that invariably arise in their busy lives without the risk of academic penalty. For example, students who know they are at risk of future, unplanned absences for work or personal reasons can select the optional policy without fear of being penalized if they can’t attend class.”

Our contention here is that what works for these nontraditional students will also work for disabled students, whose routines might be easily or repeatedly affected by medial or other life reasons. If paired with some universally designed teaching practices, like openly shared lecture videos, this process could allow disabled students a greater degree of engagement with the course on their own terms.

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Topic 3: Universal Design for Learning

Intersections of Engagement and Representation

How can students get the content of the course if they’re not there in person

Recorded lectures
Zoom access
Shared note taking
Slides available

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Action and Expression

Representation

Engagement

UDL

Elliott 1.5-2min

One of the challenges we often speak about when we discuss absences and attendance is how students will still be able to learn the content if they’re not in class when it’s taught. How will students participate if they are not physically present?

There are other options, depending on the situation that can be appropriate substitutes, especially when combined. Students can view recorded lectures or zoom into class instead of being physically present. Another really common technique is to make presentation slides available on Canvas. This is something I I observe a lot as a student and I always really appreciate having them, it’s a great way of handling this, especially if students miss a word or need to go back and copy something for their notes later on.

Another technique is shared notetaking. Students often do this informally, but this is great to do formally as well. Instituting a policy where some students are responsible for taking and sharing notes with the whole class is very helpful as it can show insight into someone else’s process, and what they found to be most important during the lesson. It’s also a great access tool for those who can’t take their own notes or are not able to be present.

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Topic 3: Universal Design for Learning

Interactions of Engagement with Action and Expression

How can students engage in learning process if they’re not there in person

Live annotation activities
Discussion board or journal assignments
Student groups outside of class
Optional readings or peer-graded activities

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Representation

Engagement

UDL

Action and Expression

Andrew

We can learn a few things by thinking about the interaction between engagement and action and expression. Here, we are thinking of ways to supplement a non-penalty-based attendance policy with activities that could work asynchronously to encourage learning even when students have to be absent. These are universal design options, not one-offs for certain students. Some possible options include things like live annotation of a reading using the tool Hypothesis or Google Documents. You can upload a document to these platforms, and students can highlight passages, leave comments, comment on one another’s comments, and develop the kind of recursive, self-driven conversation that is a good alternative to class discussion. Indeed, the two can go together since UDL is about multiple means of engagement, not one or the other.

You always have the option of traditional canvas discussion posts, blogging, or journaling as activities to encourage learning. These add a bit to your labor if you decide to grade them, but like in-class discussion, the activity itself has some real value even if it’s not evaluated. You can also require students to meet in groups outside of class, on Zoom or in person, to discuss the material and teach one another. I sometimes do this in the form of peer recorded videos that they can exchange asynchronously. Optional readings are also a good way to allow students the choice of how to engage with the material of the class. All of these methods allow us to give students decision making about their engagement with the class while maintaining a vibrant experience of action and expression.

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Sharing and Response Circle

We need a volunteer to speak aloud

you will be included in the recording

Share your situation:

What is your attendance policy like?
What issues are you running into?
What advice would you like from the group?

Write your response in the chat

Are you running into the same issue?
What positives or negatives do you see?
What ideas do you have to help?

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Take Aways

Topic 1: Disabled students have valuable perspectives on the impacts of mandatory attendance policies

Topic 2: Faculty use attendance policies to manage aspects of their classes, which have impacts on their labor for the class

Topic 3: A universal design approach can help alleviate some of the challenges of managing attendance and retain good learning practices

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Questions and Further Discussion Ideas

We will stick around after the workshop, too

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Thank you for your time and attention

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Email: icds@wwu.edu
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Please fill out our survey about this workshop (coming to your email)

Stay tuned for a recording and resource page based on this workshop

Disability Pedagogy Group - Every other Wednesday at 5pm

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