Standing room only: faculty intervention increases voluntary lecture attendance and performance for disadvantaged year 1 Bioscience students

Kerry Ann Dickson,Bruce Warren Stephens

doi:10.1080/23752696.2015.1134196

Kerry Ann Dickson, Bruce Warren Stephens

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2015.1134196

Copy DOI

Abstract

Literature shows that attendance is an important bidirectional link in engaging students in learning. However, metacognitive awareness eludes many first-year students – particularly the disadvantaged, including those with low admission scores, English as a second language or coming from low socio-economic status (SES), migrant, or first-in-family backgrounds. Our intention was to encourage punctual lecture attendance, but without making it compulsory, in a year 1 Anatomy unit. We compared lecture attendance without and with updatings which informed students of their own accumulated attendance. Thus, the lecturer encouraged student time management. Compared with the other cohort, for students who were informed of their accumulated attendance, lecture attendance (56.5 vs. 77.5%) and performance (54.2 vs. 58.9%) were higher, the failure rate was about one-third lower (31.7 vs. 22.1%), the percentage of students scoring over 80% was 2.5 times higher, and the performance advantage of students’ admission score was removed. Furthermore, updating on attendance resulted in low SES students attending to the level of high SES students. These findings suggest that simply updating students on their accumulated lecture attendance has a surprisingly strong effect on their performance, particularly if they are underachievers or from low SES backgrounds.

Highlights

Anatomy, either as a stand-alone unit or as part of Bioscience, is integral to medical, biomedical, and health curricula – as it underpins the development of clinical knowledge and skills
Irrespective of the way it was recorded in our study, lecture attendance was voluntary
We found that updating students on their accumulated attendance increased both lecture attendance and performance

Summary

Introduction

Either as a stand-alone unit or as part of Bioscience, is integral to medical, biomedical, and health curricula – as it underpins the development of clinical knowledge and skills. Lu and Lemonde (2013) showed that online teaching (Lectopia and real-time tutorials with postings and virtual whiteboards) was as effective as face-to-face (Powerpoint) for academically high-performing Health Science students. Importantly, they found that lower performing students had a gradual worsening of performance with each more cognitively challenging question. They found that lower performing students had a gradual worsening of performance with each more cognitively challenging question These results suggest that, unless other resources are available, underachieving students may require attendance at face-to-face classes for deep learning to occur and that the learning scape (online, blended, face-to-face) may need to take into account the characteristics of the student cohort. Our study addresses the question of how educators can encourage students to take responsibility for attending lectures, without making them compulsory

Methods

Results

Conclusion