Attendance and participation are considered non-assessment items because they do not evaluate a student’s knowledge or skills. Each course is aligned to a program’s learning objectives. It may also be aligned to Common Curriculum objectives.  Each course has course-level learning objectives. Non-assessment measures provide little to no insight into which and to what extent students have mastered those learning objectives. They also tend to artificially inflate grades, allowing students with marginal understanding to pass through compliance, rather than mastery.

Positive encouragement to attend class

• Share with students at the start of the semester your commitment to be there for every class and ask for the same commitment from them.
• Focus on helping students connect to each other and what you teach. Increased belonging and relevance are much better predictors of high attendance than giving grades for it.
• UConn is a non-attendance-taking institution. This means that attendance cannot be used to grade student achievement. Although UConn is non-attendance-taking, it does not mean that instructors cannot take attendance, only that they cannot grade attendance. The mere fact of taking attendance is often a strong signal to students of the importance of attending.
• Encourage students to contact you if they are going to miss class. This is not intended as a punishment but rather to develop a culture in which students recognize their responsibility to attend class.
• Create a classroom environment that provides added value to the students with in-class activities.

Alternatives to grading attendance or participation

In some scenarios, participation grading is actually based on attendance, but many ways exist to create opportunities for participation and to measure it. Here are a few ideas:

• Use a rubric to measure participation during classroom activities. The use of a rubric eliminates basing participation on instructor recall of student engagement and subjective criteria.
• Develop activities or problems that are completed in the classroom. These activities can be graded, not graded, or simply marked as complete/incomplete. Have students doing active, important learning activities in class that will be essential to doing well on major assessments.
• Administer formative assessments which can be graded as complete and incomplete, such as minute papers, memory matrix, misconception/preconception checks, student generation of test questions, opinion polls, or muddiest point. More ideas are available at http://s.uconn.edu/4g4. These allow instructors to gain information about what the students do and do not understand. These can be graded as complete and incomplete.
• Use technology to survey students during class. Consider tools such as Slido, iClicker, Poll Everywhere, and Webex or Teams polling. Similar to other formative assessments, these will assist in understanding what students understand.
• Administer a quiz at the start of class to assess pre-reading or understanding of previous content.

Resources

Dagostino, S. (2023). Should class participation be graded? Inside Higher Ed. January 3, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/teaching/2023/01/03/should-class-participation-be-graded-college#

Lange, J. M. (2021).  Should we stop grading class participation?  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  April 9, 2021.  https://www.chronicle.com/article/should-we-stop-grading-class-participation

Lang, J. M. (2021).  Two ways to fairly grade class participation.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  May 17, 2021.  https://www.chronicle.com/article/2-ways-to-fairly-grade-class-participation

McMurtrie, B. (2022).  Rethinking participation.  The Chronicle of Higher Education – Teaching.  September 8, 2022.  https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/teaching/2022-09-08?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_5033556_nl_Teaching_date_20220908&cid=te&source=ams&sourceid=