Reaction to Class Yesterday/Attendance and Course Performance/Teamwork and Project Teams

First, we are down to 25 students enrolled in the class.  Yesterday, 16 were in attendance.  For an upper level course in the major, that is not a great batting average.  I understand that some of you are interviewing for jobs.  When that happens the adult thing to do is to let me know about it ahead of time.  A few of you do that.  Most of the absences remain unexplained, from my view.

Yesterday I mainly lectured but then tried to verbally quiz students about the concepts as we proceeded.  While my measurement is admittedly subjective, it seemed to me that most students weren't getting it, even while this is the part that is straightforward.  Next week there is real subtlety in the homework.  How can you make that step up if you are not standing on terra firma now?  

My sense is that many students are mechanically doing the Excel homework without really thinking through the questions and the text that is there to explain things.  The approach allows you to submit the key, but there is little take away from the exercise that you can use elsewhere.  (In other words, it is not building human capital.)  For students who were present yesterday, you experienced the quizzing that I was doing.  Can you do that yourself while you do the homework and/or after you submit it but then want to make sure you understand it?  Something like that is needed.

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I took the class attendance data that is not perfect (meaning some dates are not included) but is more extensive than I've previously collected and plotted it against current course points as reported in Moodle.  I completely threw out the first two weeks of attendance, because some students added the course then and I didn't know how to control for that in a simple way.  (The entire exercise took me about 15 minutes.)  

You can see the scatter that was produced and there is a regression line as well.  There is no doubt that attendance and class performance correlate.  You may recall that one day I mentioned John Nash, popularized in A Beautiful Mind, who never went to class but did pathbreaking work.  We don't seem to have another John Nash in our class, the instructor included.  For the rest of us mere mortals, putting in more effort in the learning matters regarding measured performance.  Coming to class, which I would have hoped is something to be enjoyed for the most part, appears to be its own form of effort. That's my interpretation of what the data show. 

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During the past week several high attendance students have told me about teammates who have missed team meetings and haven't yet done their share of the work on the first draft.  I gather that the free riders are low attendance students.  There is, then, the matter of what should be done about it, if anything? 

Let me first describe the ideal from the instructor's view.  The holy grail in teaching is to elevate each and every student.  For the already high attendance students, that is to get them to consider the ideas of the course in a deeper way and to encourage that they learn in this deeper way in their other studies.  For the currently low attendance students, the next step would be to encourage greater diligence from them.  Attending class more frequently would be one indicator of that.

There is research that supports the hypothesis that students learn from other students, perhaps more than what they learn from their professors.  So there was some hope that the project teams might provide that type of learning.  And maybe on teams that are functioning well, that is happening.  But on other teams where there is some free riding, it is evident that the experience is not sufficiently intensive to overcome the larger patterns in the class that are evidenced in the scatter on attendance and performance. 

Now, as to what to do about it, here are a few thoughts.  First, teams must self-insure so that what is turned in represents a good effort.  This should happen even when one of the members is free riding.  Second, I hold out hope that things can be made better, so I ask team members to encourage a teammate who has been slacking so far, to participate in full for the remainder of the project, if the person is willing to do so.  Third, note that the bulk of the points in the course have still not be allocated.  That is a feature, not a bug.  (Some economics explanation for that will come in a few weeks.)  While I will continue to give all team members the same number of points on their projects, that was in the rules I set up and I need to go by the rules, note, for example, that I was pretty generous on the points for the blog posts first half among students who missed posts.  I will be sterner in my evaluation in the second half.  Seeing evidence of student effort in the course (or not) will impact that evaluation.