Class attendance is a very important ingredient of retention, as both practitioners and researchers can attest. As colleges and universities struggle to improve their graduation rates, one school has implemented a system of electronic scanning in its large lecture classes, where taking roll doesn't work very well.
Northern Arizona University used federal stimulus money to install the devices at the entry to many of its largest classrooms. Students use their student ID cards to register their attendance electronically. The story is covered in a recent segment of National Public Radio, available here.
Not surprisingly, some students at NAU have organized protests, claiming big brotherism and a commendable desire to be treated as adults who are responsible for their own actions. The NPR piece doesn't outline the consequences to students of failure to register attendance in any given class. It does say that class participation is increasingly a component of the grade in many classes at this particular school.
The NPR segment also doesn't explore the possibility of student surrogates using each other's ID cards.
From the NPR piece:
"When I started here, I was of the mindset that this is college — students should decide for themselves whether they should show up or not," says associate professor Brandon Cruickshank, who has taught Chemistry 101 in a cavernous classroom at the university for 15 years. "This is no longer high school."
But over the years, he's seen that attending class does matter. So now he factors class participation into his students' grades. Most of his students are freshmen.
"We do have to say to a lot of those students that it really is important that you do show up to class — you are not going to do well if you're not there," he says.
Research suggests that missing even one class can result in a lower GPA for first-year students. And a freshman's grades, in particular, are really important, says Karen Pugliesi, NAU's vice provost for academic affairs.
"The stronger a student's grade performance in the first year, the far more likely they are to persist at NAU and graduate," she says.
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