Cover image by Ulrich from Pixabay

By Megan Sumeracki

In today’s post, I want to share a cool, relatively new paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer from Science Advances (1). The paper is titled, Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. The methodology is neat, the results are interesting, and while this paper used a higher education sample, I think educators teaching other grade levels might be able to take something from this (even if not the exact intervention).

The authors (1) note that autonomy enhances student motivation and achievement, yet many policies that are frequently adopted and even recommended by university teaching and learning centers, like mandatory attendance, mandatory drafts, etc., can undermine feelings of autonomy. They went as far as to critically analyze 13 prominent centers for teaching and learning at well-known universities and found that there was very little, if any, discussion or recommendations related to student choice. Some even argued against meaningful student autonomy. The authors argue that autonomy may benefit college students.

The purpose of the studies in the paper was to test whether policies that support student autonomy improve student outcomes. They present two studies. One was a randomized controlled field study examining the effects of allowing students to choose whether their attendance was mandatory. The other was a multi-year cohort study examining the effects of allowing students to opt out of challenging, high-effort assessments.

Today, mandatory attendance.

Study 1: Mandatory vs. Optional Attendance

The Method

This study was a randomized controlled field study testing the effects of allowing students to choose whether to make their own attendance mandatory (i.e., part of their grade). The study was conducted with college students taking a large Gen-Ed Philosophy course at Carnegie Mellon University. Students in the course were enrolled in discussion sections taught by TAs (teaching assistants). Each TA had two discussion sections, one randomly assigned to have a mandatory attendance policy with the other having an optional-mandatory policy. The TAs did not know what the hypothesis for the study was.

In the mandatory attendance sections, the TAs told the students that attendance at recitations would count toward their final grade. They were permitted to miss up to three recitations, and if they missed only three sessions or fewer, they had 3% added to their final grade. If they missed more, they had 3% subtracted from their final grade.

In the optional-mandatory sections, the TAs told the students that they got to choose if you would like attendance at recitations to count toward their final grade. If they chose for it to count, then the policy was applied in the same way as the mandatory policy. They were permitted to miss up to three recitations, and if they missed only three sessions or fewer, they had 3% added to their final grade. If they missed more, they had 3% subtracted from their final grade.

The Results

In the optional-mandatory sections, 90% of students selected to have attendance a portion of their grade. Thus, most students in the study had the same policy applied to their grade, but in one case it was imposed on them (mandatory attendance condition) and in another case it was chosen by the students. The authors found that students assigned to the optional mandatory condition were actually a bit more likely to attend class than those that were in the mandatory attendance condition. This difference was numerical but not statistically significant. Still, it suggests that the optional mandatory policy did not decrease attendance relative to mandatory attendance for all. Interestingly, they also looked at attendance across the semester. For those in the optional mandatory condition, attendance rates were relatively stable. However, attendance in the mandatory attendance condition decreased significantly throughout the course of the semester.

A reasonable person could be concerned that the 10% of students who did not choose an attendance policy could “fall through the cracks”. The authors address this head on in a way that I found reasonable. They note that mandatory attendance does not result in perfect attendance. Students still miss class, there’s just a penalty for missing class. Further, choosing no attendance policy could actually result in more intrinsic motivation. The authors wanted to honor the choice the students made to maintain autonomy for those sections, and so attendance for the students who opted out was not tracked.

Takeaways

Giving undergraduate students some autonomy and letting them opt into a mandatory attendance policy in which attendance affects their grade could serve to improve attendance overall! This relatively simple intervention could work well at the university level, and I’m considering giving it a try in one of my classes next semester. I typically make “class engagement” a part of students’ grades and emphasize that they need to be present in order to engage. I’m not sure how this would change my course, but I’m interested in giving it a try.

I suspect that this intervention would not be feasible in primary or even secondary school, but it did remind me of a my AP calculus teacher. We were allowed to choose whether we wanted to make homework a part of our grade or “opt out” and make our grades solely based on tests. If we opted into homework, we had to do at least 1/3 of each homework assignment to earn credit, and we were encouraged to do more if we felt we needed extra practice. If we opted out, we could do the homework for practice if we felt we needed it, but we didn’t have to turn it in, and our grades were entirely exam-based. Our choices were honored so long as we were earning a B or better. If our grades dropped to a C (or maybe a B-, I don’t entirely remember as it was a long time ago!) then we were moved into the homework required option automatically. Our teacher said that he would then do a bit more micromanaging of how much of the problems we needed to complete based on what he thought we needed. I remember thinking it was cool to be given the choice, even though I chose to do the homework. This type of option isn’t the same as attendance, and is a bit more related to the second study in the paper that will be covered next week. Stay tuned for opting out of challenging, high-effort assessments!

References

(1) Cullen, S., & Oppenheimer, D. (2024). Choosing to learn: The importance of student autonomy in higher education. Science Advances, 10(29), eado6759. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado6759