Low class attendance is a challenge for many teachers. Although attendance is fundamental to academic success, many students decide each week whether a particular class is worth their time, often weighing the perceived value of attending against competing academic and personal commitments.
To explore how these decisions are made, we surveyed and interviewed students on an English for academic purposes module and examined their responses to several attendance interventions. Here are strategies for boosting class attendance based on these insights.
Make the classroom irreplaceable
As an educator, you might argue that course design should not be examination-centred. However, our survey revealed grades were top of mind for most students, and a key reason for attending class in person was to learn how to perform well on assessments. It’s no coincidence that we often see attendance picks up in weeks that introduce coursework or provide assessment practice. Students attend classes when they believe something valuable happens.
So, we should frequently remind students how the class content is relevant to their assessments. Do this by explicitly connecting activities to them, explaining how concepts are likely to be applied and demonstrating what strong work looks like. Small reminders throughout a semester can help students see attendance as an investment rather than an obligation.
Another factor that influences class attendance is content relevance. Students reported being more engaged when they see connections between class activities and their academic interests or future careers. For example, our students come from a range of science disciplines. Many reported that the topics we used in class were not always directly relevant to their majors, making classes less engaging and reducing their motivation to attend.
Whether you teach disciplinary content or academic skills, students are more likely to show up when classes clearly support both their academic goals and personal interests. Working with students in disciplinary clusters helps. However, this requires institutional coordination.
At our institution, students are grouped broadly based on their academic backgrounds, such as science and engineering, business or humanities and social sciences. This allows teachers to select relevant examples, readings and tasks without creating separate courses for every discipline. For example, a lesson on evaluating evidence could use research findings from engineering for science students, market data for business students or social issues for humanities students.
To accommodate the diverse interests within each cluster, teachers can also vary topics and examples across the semester. For example, a science-focused EAP course might cover environmental science, biotechnology and engineering topics in different weeks, allowing students to see connections with their own fields. Where mixed cohorts are unavoidable, offering students some choice in topics or examples can further support these connections.
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Make attendance count
Attendance may improve when students see a tangible benefit from participating. We trialled several incentives. One approach involved low-stakes in-class assessments, such as short writing tasks. Unsurprisingly, attendance was noticeably higher in the weeks leading up to these.
We also experimented with two kinds of rewards for students who achieved attendance milestones: additional personalised feedback on formative coursework and a certificate recognising their achievement at the end of the semester. In most classes, there was a noticeable uptick in attendance compared with previous years.
The most popular incentive was additional feedback, with interviewees explaining that they thought it could directly improve their academic performance. The certificate served a different purpose. Although it was not the primary motivation, several participants appreciated recognition of their commitment.
Incentives are most effective when students perceive a clear academic benefit, while recognition can help reinforce positive behaviours.
Develop support systems for at-risk students
Incentives might encourage students who already attend semi-regularly but they are often insufficient for students who rarely attend.
To support chronically absent students, we developed a three-stage intervention system:
- The teacher contacts the absent students by email (after a set period of absence).
- If attendance does not improve, the student’s development adviser (DA) is asked to intervene (at our university a DA supports students in both academic and personal matters).
- Where appropriate, a joint meeting is arranged involving the student, DA and teacher to discuss barriers to attendance and possible solutions.
We saw a few students return after each stage of the intervention, and most surveyed students reported that the joint meeting was potentially the most beneficial.
To follow this approach, one teacher should be in charge of coordinating with the DA and tracking at-risk students’ progress and attendance. For large modules, this role could be allocated to a TA or administrative team but the more direct the teacher’s involvement, the better – it shows students that we care and are paying attention.
To attend or not is ultimately a student’s choice Educators cannot control every factor that influences the decision of whether to attend but they can shape the conditions surrounding it by making attendance more meaningful, manageable and rewarding. When we demonstrate clear benefits, offer incentives that support learning and intervene in a timely manner, we can make attending a more attractive choice.
AI declaration: The authors used ChatGPT to provide feedback on language clarity and support with proofreading. Suggested changes implemented were evaluated by the authors first.
Andrew Snyder is senior language lecturer, and Bingwing Wang and Jiayu Zhou are language lecturers at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
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