Rethinking Attendance Through Choice

1. What Is It?

"Rethinking Attendance Through Choice" is a research-informed approach to attendance and participation design that emphasizes choice, motivation, and meaningful presence rather than compliance or surveillance. This approach draws from recent scholarship on student motivation, including Cullen & Oppenheimer's ( 2024) research on choice-based attendance and discussed in their Teaching in Higher Ed (2025) interview. Their studies show that, when students can choose whether attendance counts toward their grade (a form of self-directed pre-commitment), attendance and engagement often increase more than in traditional mandatory-attendance systems. It is also grounded in Self-Determination Theory ( Deci & Ryan, 1985), which emphasizes that motivation deepens when learners experience choice/agency, growth/mastery, and connection/relatedness.

In short, rethinking attendance means designing a structure that helps students want to participate and follow through on that intention, rather than showing up solely because they are required to.

2. Why It Matters in Online and Face-to-Face Learning

Attendance and participation remain among the best predictors of course success. Students who engage consistently tend to learn more, feel more connected, and persist at higher rates. In their meta-analysis, Li and Xue ( 2023) found that student engagement is strongly associated with participation, attendance, and persistence across higher-education contexts.

At the same time, traditional mandatory attendance policies can unintentionally work against engagement ( St. Clair, 1999; Cullen & Oppenheimer, 2024). They may:

  • Undermine motivation by emphasizing control and signaling mistrust ("you wouldn't come unless I forced you")
  • Trigger shame or anxiety for students with irregular schedules, chronic illness, caregiving, or work obligations
  • Create unnecessary paperwork and adversarial dynamics between learners and educators

Cullen & Oppenheimer's ( 2024) research helps explain this tension, particularly in the post-2020 context, when flexibility increased, but many instructors observed rising absenteeism ( Supiano, 2023). Their findings suggest that flexibility alone is insufficient. What matters is choice paired with commitment. Specifically, 90% of students in the optional-mandatory condition chose to make attendance count, and those students maintained high attendance rates across the semester. By contrast, attendance declined over time in fully mandatory sections. In the optional-mandatory condition, students also reported feeling trusted, respected, and more committed to the course.

In online and hybrid environments, where courses are already more flexible and less visibly present for students, this balance is especially important. Without clear participation structures, students may disengage unintentionally. Designing attendance as intentional participation, rather than mere presence, supports learning while acknowledging real-world constraints.

3. Try it Out

a. Start with purpose, not points. As you review or redesign your attendance or participation policies, start by looking back before you plan forward. Reviewing patterns from previous semesters can help you ground design choices in evidence rather than assumptions, especially if you are considering an opt-in attendance or participation structure. Clarify why being present (in person or synchronously online) matters in your course by examining your own data and experience:

  • What relationships do you notice between missed class sessions or participation and final grades or learning outcomes?
  • Which learning activities truly require live presence, and which can be engaged asynchronously with equal rigor?
  • Which forms of participation best support diverse students across modalities, neurotypes, schedules, and access needs?
  • Which aspects of your current policy feel aligned with your values, and which feel inherited, punitive, or primarily administrative?

Making these purposes explicit for students, as well as for you, helps shift attendance expectations from enforcement toward learning. Research shows that interactive activities such as discussion, peer learning, and collaborative meaning-making benefit from live participation, while reflective writing, independent problem-solving, content analysis, and project-based work can be equally rigorous in asynchronous formats (Chi & Wylie, 2014; Hrastinski, 2008). Regular participation also supports long-term learning through spaced practice and retrieval (Cepeda et al., 2006; Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).

You also might consider hashing out some of the finer details with students in Community Agreements. (Check out our CTL Teaching Ideas resource on Community Agreements for more information.) These shared commitments, created or instructor-provided, establish how you intend to foster classroom community, as well as what values will guide your class interactions. Attendance and participation should reflect and support the environment your agreements describe. By grounding your design choices in what you know about student success in your course and community agreements, attendance becomes less about enforcement and more about living the values the class has agreed to uphold.

b. Offer realistic, meaningful choices.

A concrete example from Cullen & Oppenheimer's ( 2024) field study is the "optional-mandatory attendance" policy. At the start of the semester, students choose whether attendance will count toward their grade.

  • Those who opt in follow a traditional attendance-counting structure (e.g., X allowed absences with a component of the final grade reflecting attendance).
  • Those who opt out have no attendance requirement or grade impact for attendance, though attendance is still encouraged. Other grades such as exams or quizzes therefore carry a larger weight in the course.

This gives students meaningful agency while maintaining a shared understanding of expectations and outcome

c. Support pre-commitment, not punishment.

Alternative assessment models such as contract grading and labor-based grading offer a useful lens for rethinking attendance and participation. Rather than defining engagement narrowly or relying on penalties for absence, these approaches emphasize clear expectations, negotiated commitments, and multiple equivalent ways to participate.

In contract and labor-based grading models, such as labor-based grading contracts, students collaboratively establish at the beginning of the term a set of participation, engagement, and learning activities aligned with course goals, which form the basis for course grades (Inoue, 2019; Larson, 2023). Engagement is defined by the work students commit to doing, which could include participation in a certain number of sessions, or it could be defined by other kinds of assessments. This structure supports pre-commitment: students make intentional choices about how they will engage and are held accountable to those commitments.

Applied to attendance, this perspective shifts the question from "What happens if students miss class?" to "What forms of participation meaningfully support learning, and how can students commit to them in advance?" By offering transparent participation options and treating them as equally legitimate, instructors can support autonomy and equity while maintaining clear, shared standards for engagement.

d. Normalize life, reduce shame.

Attendance/participation policies should acknowledge human realities and avoid requiring students to "prove" their legitimacy. These practices might include:

  • Automatic excused absences (no documentation) or "life happens" buffers. Check with your department on expectations. Many use two weeks in a sixteen-week course as the maximum number of absences before a student should drop the course.
  • Asynchronous alternatives for in-person class sessions. (These may be more or less feasible depending on the location, size, and structure of your course)

Together, these approaches signal trust in students as whole people and shift attendance from a mechanism of surveillance to a supportive structure that sustains engagement, dignity, and access.

e. Center trust, connection, and transparency.

Cullen & Oppenheimer's participants repeatedly said: "You trusted us" and "It felt like being treated as an adult." The act of trusting students is itself a teaching strategy that directly shapes learning. It's not a "soft" attitude or add-on but a recognition of how learning happens. A Community Agreement activity offers an opportunity to discuss with your students

  • why you value engagement
  • what participation looks like in your course
  • how students can choose what's best for their learning.

In this way, Community Agreements make trust visible and actionable, clarifying shared expectations while supporting student agency and meaningful engagement

4. Notes About Accessibility

Designing attendance/participation policies is deeply connected to accessibility. Consider:

  • Disability & chronic illness: Some students have fluctuating conditions; pre-commitment and flexibility reduces the need for constant accommodation requests.
  • Neurodiversity: Some students engage best asynchronously or with structured prompts.
  • Caregiving & work obligations: Mandatory presence can unintentionally penalize nontraditional students.
  • Technology & bandwidth constraints: Online students may not be able to attend synchronous sessions reliably
  • Documentation burden: Requiring medical notes can create an undue burden on learners and saddle you with attempting to parse paperwork validity.

A flexible, choice-based approach, paired with transparent expectations, helps create learning environments where students can participate fully without risking stigma, shame, or administrative burden.

5. Collaborate & Refine

Consider engaging others in your design process:

6. Continuing the Journey

Designing attendance is iterative. A few "next steps" you might explore:

Over time, these practices help shift attendance from a compliance mechanism toward a shared commitment to learning, grounded in trust, flexibility, and care.

7. Connections to UNM Frameworks

8. References

Chi, M. T., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 49(4), 219-243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.965823

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16719566/

Cullen, S., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024). Choosing to learn: The importance of student autonomy in higher education. Science Advances, 10(29), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado6759

Hrastinski, S. (2008). Asynchronous and synchronous e-learning. Educause Quarterly, 31(4), 51--55. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2008/11/asynchronous-and-synchronous-elearning

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse. https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/perspectives/labor/

Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772-775. 10.1126/science.1199327

Larson, M. (2023, January 30). What is contract grading? Center for Transformative Teaching, University of Nebraska--Lincoln. https://teaching.unl.edu/resources/alternative-grading/contract-grading/

Li, J., & Xue, E. (2023). Dynamic interaction between student learning behavior and learning environment: Meta-analysis of student engagement and its influencing factors. Behavioral Sciences, 13(1), 59. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13010059

St. Clair, K. L. (1999). A case against compulsory class attendance policies in higher education. Innovative Higher Education, 23(3), 171-180. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ582077

Stachowiak, B. (Host). (2025, October 9). Rethinking student attendance policies for deeper engagement and learning (No. 591) [Audio podcast episode]. In Teaching in Higher Ed. https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/rethinking-student-attendance-policies-for-deeper-engagement-and-learning/

Supiano, B. (2023, February 13). Course correction: Students expect 'total flexibility' in the pandemic-era classroom. But is that really what they need? The Chronicle of Higher Education.https://www.chronicle.com/article/course-correction