Difference Between Attendance and Participation
Attendance in a course refers to being physically present during a class session. Attendance is generally easier to define and measure as there are school or university guidelines that govern attendance requirements. At Columbia Business School there are Attendance Requirements for the MBA Program. Measuring attendance means keeping a record of whether a student was present in the classroom, absent, or late.
Participation in a course is the active engagement of a student in classroom activities and with course materials. How we measure participation will therefore depend on how each course defines engagement. The most common understanding of class participation is how often a student speaks up in class. Paff (2015) describes how “participating in class is very different than submitting an exam or writing a paper because of the inherently social and public nature of speaking in class” (p.135).
Grading Participation Can Be Challenging
Grading or measuring participation or engagement often depends on an instructor’s memory, observations, or instincts. It can even be subject to the recency effect, where the instructor remembers a student who participated later in the semester more than one who participated earlier on. There are also concerns about bias, where an instructor may grade some students more favorably than others, leading to concerns about fairness. For students, the anxiety of speaking in front of others can be a barrier to class participation.
It can also be challenging to quantify the significance of a student’s contribution to a discussion. Lang (2021) gives the example of “an introvert who makes one comment that changes the way we all think about the material, and an extrovert who makes ten comments that are the equivalent of ‘I agree with that.’” Therefore, any meaningful participation grade should consider the quality of students’ contributions and not only how often they speak up in class.
Moving from Participation to Student Engagement
To learn deeply and well, “students need to be active participants in that process. This typically involves doing something - for example, thinking, reading, discussing, problem-solving or reflecting” (Barkely, 2010, p.94). To promote student engagement, we must design classroom activities that require critical thinking and problem-solving, provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning, and create a learning environment that fosters curiosity and exploration. Here are examples of active learning strategies from the K. Patricia Cross Academy.
Participation Activities
Traditionally, cold calling and warm calling have often been used to engage students in the classroom. Although these methods may still be used, consider other ways students can participate in your course or with your course materials. Provide students with multiple opportunities to participate, to engage every learner and make grading for participation more equitable. Below are some examples of other ways students can participate in your course. With each of these examples, it is still important to provide a rubric or some type of grading criteria for participation.
Polling
Receive immediate feedback on whether students are learning using polling technology, such as Poll Everywhere. Even better to share the responses with students to give them feedback on their own learning. Polling can also be a class discussion starter to gauge prior knowledge and readiness to discuss certain topics. To learn more, review the CBS Poll Everywhere guide. Some examples of how to write good poll questions:
- Asking Meaningful Questions (Turning Technologies)
- Sample Polling Question Types
- Developing Poll Questions to Engage and Assess Student Thinking in Science and Engineering Courses (Columbia CTL)
Entry/Exit Tickets
Ask students a concept check question(s) at the beginning or end of the class session. They can submit via a polling tool or on paper. Every student that writes a response will earn the participation grade for that day. These concept checks serve as formative methods for faculty and students to track students’ understanding of the course material. Some sample questions might be:
- What is one new thing you learned from the reading assigned to you for homework?
- What question do you have on our topic today?
- What are the 2-3 main takeaways from class today?
- What is one thing that is unclear or confusing from class today?
- Based on today’s class, what might be a good exam question?
Group Google Doc Assignments or Document Annotations
Adopt online tools to facilitate group participation. Students can have discussions in smaller groups or engage with course materials through a Google doc. Students can interact with Google docs to collaborate in or outside of class. Google docs or other annotation software allows students to focus their conversation around a particular text.
Discussion Boards
During class, it may be challenging for some students to quickly process what you’re teaching and formulate a verbal response to participate. Online discussion boards used between class sessions allow students to respond after they have had time to reflect and craft an answer. Some tools available for online discussion are Canvas Discussions and Ed Discussion.
Grading Participation
If you include a participation grade in your course, make it clear how you will measure it. Bean and Peterson (1998) argue that grading class participation shows “students about the kind of learning and thinking an instructor values, such as growth in critical thinking, active learning, development of listening and speaking skills needed for career success, and the ability to join a discipline’s conversation” (p.33). How you determine a student’s participation grade should reflect why you value participation in your course.
Provide Clear Guidelines for How Participation is Graded
In the Syllabus
Use the syllabus to set expectations. Share the percentage the participation grade is worth, as well as why participation is important in your course and how you will assess participation.
Use Rubrics
Use rubrics to explain further how you will assess participation and help students understand how to prepare for each class session and how you expect them to engage. You could collaborate with your students to develop a rubric so that there is class consensus on what constitutes high-quality participation in the course. Samberg’s participation rubric is an excellent place to start. You can learn more about rubrics in the Incorporating Rubrics Into Your Feedback and Grading Policies teaching guide from Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).
Establish Methods for Tracking Participation
Establish and share with students what method you will use to track participation. For discussions, you can use index cards or a spreadsheet to track student contributions. You can also use SeatGen which allows you to mark frequency and quality of comments. Responses to polling questions through Poll Everywhere can be scored in Canvas and contribute to the participation grade.
Methods for Taking Attendance
There are various ways to track attendance with or without the use of technology. As attendance is a requirement for the programs at the Columbia Business School, attendance should be tracked but not necessarily associated with a grade.
Sign-In Sheet
Print a sheet of paper with the students’ names listed alphabetically. Ask students to sign next to their names to denote that they are present in class today.
Seating Chart
Create seating charts using SeatGen at the beginning of the term and print out a seating chart for each class session. Instruct students to sit in assigned seats, and at the beginning of each class, scan the room for empty chairs and mark the students who are absent that day. You (or your TA) can also mark attendance directly within the SeatGen application.
Roll Call
For smaller courses, you can call out the names of your students at the beginning of class and mark students as present or absent. This can be done by hand using a printed list of students’ names or using an excel spreadsheet with students’ names and all class session dates. You can also use the Roll Call tool in Canvas.
Poll Everywhere
Although Poll Everywhere can be used to track attendance, the Dean's Office strongly recommends that you don't rely solely on this tool for tracking attendance. To learn more about this tool, review the CBS Poll Everywhere guide.
References
Elizabeth F. Barkley. (2010). Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. Jossey-Bass.
Bean, J. C., & Peterson, D. (1998). Grading Classroom Participation. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1998(74), 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.7403
Lang, J. (2021, May 17). Advice | 2 Ways to Fairly Grade Class Participation. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/2-ways-to-fairly-grade-class-participation
Lang, J. (2021, April 9). Advice | Should We Stop Grading Class Participation? The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/should-we-stop-grading-class-participation
Paff, L. A. (2015). Does Grading Encourage Participation? Evidence & Implications. College Teaching, 63(4), 135–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2015.1028021