Meggin’s Current Articles

Professors – Taking Attendance Without Wasting Time and Sometimes Even Encouraging Student Learning

18th April, 2010 - Posted by Meggin - No Comments

You might be required by your department, college, or university take attendance. Or, possibly there are particular students (such as student athletes) who have to document attendance in their courses – and you are the one who has to keep those records. On the other hand, you may not be required to record attendance but you want to for your own reasons (I was one of those, by the way). Here are five ideas to help you “take roll,” using the old-fashioned vernacular.

Use clickers.Clickers are apparently all the rage and if you are one of the people who uses them for in-class responses, then use them for attendance as well. If you do not use clickers, then keep reading for one of the other ideas shared in this week’s list of top ten productivity tips.

Pass around a sign-in sheet (ho-hum, but it works). This is one of my least favorite ways for a number of reasons, including the fact that as it comes to a student, that student now takes his/her mind off of the instructional activity that is going on to focus on signing the sheet. Some faculty worry that students are signing in for other students or signing and leaving, etc. If these are your worries, too, then go on to some of the other ideas, but I had to list this one since it is one of the options.

End class with a closure activity that involves some level of response, which is submitted as students leave the class. You can ask students to respond to one of the learning experiences, reflect on their learning that day, ask a question for next class period, or any of a number of other possibilities. Since they don’t know what the closure activity will be, there is no possibility of leaving before the end of class thinking that someone else can somehow register them as being there.

Start class with a quiz or other in-class assignment. Part of what I expected from my students was on-time arrival. Beginning class with a quiz or other quick point-based assignment helped encourage that behavior. Plus, I didn’t have to take roll because I had their assignments (or didn’t). If a student was late, then it was the student’s responsibility to let me know somehow that he/she had been in attendance.

Have a quiz or other in-class assignment somewhere mid-class. In a 50-minute class, you need to be having some kind of “change-up” activity, so having students complete and turn in some assignment or quick quiz, which then also serves as a way of taking roll serves a dual purpose. How productive!!

With all the competing demands for students’ attention and time, we sometimes have to “encourage” their attendance by acknowledging that they are in class. Try one of the ideas from this article and see how it works for you and your students.

And for scores (and soon hundreds) of sets of Top Ten Productivity Tips like these, including ones specifically for professors, you’re invited to join others around the globe who subscribe (free) to one of the Top Ten Productivity Tips series (info to be found at):

** http://TopTenProductivityTips.com

(c) 2010 Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D. | The Ph.D. of Productivity(tm)