I have a real question. What’s the relationship between class attendance and success in the learning outcomes of a course?
Why does attendance really matter that much? Do we really have to control it to the degree we think we need to? Instead of failing (or reducing a grade for) students on the basis of mere presence, can we not just wait and see if students struggle on assessments (that, in theory, are closely aligned to the course learning outcomes) instead of rigidly requiring and punitively tracking attendance? Is that really not sufficient?
Certainly in any kind of learning we ought not to strive for the wrong kind of rigor, but I admit that I used to feel differently about attendance in language courses.
In language education, we instructors generally feel that time spent equals exposure to input, so lost time equals lost input. But is that always, or necessarily, the case?
Course attendance doesn’t automatically equal access to input, doesn’t necessarily reflect engagement, and certainly isn’t the only path to language acquisition. Even when we are present in class (physically or virtually), we are human and our attention slips. Our minds drift out the open window, sometimes, and all of a sudden I can’t remember the future imperative in French.
This is a complex question, to be sure. It involves the role of placement (placing students in a course commensurate with their language level), which is sometimes a very hard thing to do when many language programs have limited access to valid and reliable (and often costly) tools for measuring proficiency. When students are placed incorrectly in levels too low for them, they can sometimes “squeak by” in a class via only minimal attendance and participation. What’s so wrong with that, I wonder? Is the attendance in cases like this an indication of learning, or does it just align with success in the learning outcomes in the course as designed? For some students, gains in learning manifest as something else entirely: progress, new language learning motivation, etc.
This debate also calls into question the role of graded participation, which has long been aligned with ideals of Western social interaction in educational settings. We call our participation “active,” and we don’t always provide multiple paths for students to demonstrate their engagement and practice with the language. Rigid conceptualizations of what it means to participate are problematic when students’ grades are tied to how extroverted they are feeling on a particular day.
The good news is, we don’t have to cling to what we’ve done before.
One way of thinking differently about this issue is to treat absence as universal, in a way. I think we could learn to expect absence, not as a deficiency, but as a normal thing that happens to humans from time to time. Part of this would also be understanding that sometimes flukes in life don’t happen just occasionally and only at convenient times, and thus aren’t always covered by the line in the syllabus where we tell students they get 2 absence freebies without penalization. We have all had instances in our lives when, for whole chunks of time, things do not go well for us. We’ve had sick children. We’ve had surgeries and recovery periods. We’ve had (have) global pandemics. We’ve experienced gun violence on our campuses. We’ve had grief of many types.
If we could start building into early design stages some comparable and equitable (not identical or equal) opportunities for student engagement in times of absence, we might alleviate some undue stress for our students. It might be a little more work at first on the front end, but I would bet it will save us some headaches and spare us some chaos in the long run. Plus, I am of the belief that not penalizing students for engaging however they can in inequitably designed systems when life is coming at them at full speed is just the right thing to do.
“Ungrading” would also be a good solution to explore, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Caitlin Cornell 