Offering choices inspires students to attend and excel

Moving from school to university can be a bit of a culture shock — not least because, maybe for the first time ever, young people have to manage their own time. With new friends, nights out, and other distractions, you'd be forgiven for thinking that making attendance mandatory is the best way of keeping students coming to class. Not so, according to a new study in Science Advances.

Instead, Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer of Carnegie Mellon University have found that giving students the ability to choose might be the way forward — suggesting that strict attendance measures might actually be counterproductive.

For their latest study, the team first conducted a survey with 101 students who had enrolled in one of their classes. Participants were asked about their experience of different policies, including mandatory attendance, optional attendance, and optional-mandatory attendance (for which students could choose to sign up to have their attendance tracked). Students first indicated whether they had experience with each policy, and if so, reported how they thought this policy had affected their motivation, enjoyment, learning, and relationship with the teaching team.

In-keeping with some stereotypes, while the students reported learning more in classes with a mandatory attendance policy, they also reported enjoying them far less. They shared that they were less motivated to attend them, and gave much more favourable evaluations to classes with flexible attendance policies.

A second study sought to understand how this might work in practice, taking a real-life approach. Four teaching assistants at Carnegie Mellon University were randomly assigned to teach one class under a mandatory attendance policy and another under an optional-mandatory policy. Students of these assistants in the mandatory condition were told that they could miss up to three classes before their final grade was docked 3%, while those in the optional-mandatory condition could choose whether or not their attendance counted towards their final grade.

For those that could choose whether their attendance was mandatory, 90% opted to do so. Compared to students in the mandatory cohort, optional-mandatory students attended their classes slightly more often, but this difference in attendance was not significant between groups. Attendance in the mandatory group decreased over the course of the term, while it remained stable in the optional-mandatory condition.

In the final part of the experiment, the team looked at whether allowing similar choices in other areas of academic life could encourage more effort from students. For this investigation, 114 student participants were again placed into two cohorts: one in which completing a set of difficult problems was mandatory, and another in which students could choose between doing these problems or writing a lower-effort essay.

Similar to the previous study, 90% of those in the free-to-switch condition initially set out to complete the problem sets, and only 5% switched to writing an essay, suggesting that this autonomy motivated them to tackle the trickier option. These students also seemed to work harder, with those who were free to switch to essay-based assessment having 3.6 times the odds of reporting spending more time on their assignments. This also helped their performance: for each additional assignment, the odds of achieving the highest grade increased by roughly 16% more in the free-to-switch cohort than in the mandatory cohort.

"Students can be driven to excel in our classes by the same sources of motivation that drive them to pursue countless projects and passions that require no external incentives," co-author Simon Cullen shared in a press release. "But only if we let them choose to learn." Cullen also notes that more work should be done to understand this effect amongst different types of people; he mentions, in particular, disabled students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Regardless of the scope of this study, the results do give some steer for institutions and educators. While it may seem like forcing students to attend classes is the way to make them engage, allowing them space to motivate themselves might be the most inspiring thing of all.

Read the paper in full:
Cullen, S., & Oppenheimer, D. (2024). Choosing to learn: The importance of student autonomy in higher education. Science Advances, 10(29). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado6759

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