Attendance

Why I Started Grading Attendance

James BaileyLeave a comment

I’ve taught college classes since 2010, but I never graded attendance directly until this year. I thought that students are adults who can make their own choices about where to spend their time, and if they could do well on my tests and assignments without spending much time in class, more power to them.

But I got tired of seeing students miss a lot of class, then fail by getting poor grades on the tests and assignments, or scramble for the last few weeks to avoid failing. Explaining the importance of attendance didn’t seem to help, so I finally turned to the economist’s solution- incentives. This Spring I tried grading attendance in one class, and this successful experiment plus the growth of AI mean I plan to grade attendance in all classes from now on.

The Benefits:

  • Get to know student’s names faster
  • Students feel rewarded for showing up
  • Students show up more, bringing more energy to the room
  • Students show up more, so they learn more and do better on other assignments
  • Physically showing up is one thing I can be sure the AI isn’t doing for them, it will be a while before humanoid robots are that good

The Costs That Turned Out Not to Be Big Deals

  • I thought students would dislike me policing their whereabouts and give me lower course evaluations (which is part of why I waited for tenure to try this). But my Spring evals were at least as high as usual, with none mentioning the attendance policy. When I asked students in a different class about this, most said they wished I would grade attendance if it meant less weight on exams.
  • I thought tracking attendance would be burdensome, but it turns out my main course software (Canvas) already has an attendance-tracking tool built in that lets you just click on names in a seating chart each day and enters grades automatically. It is certainly less burdensome than grading most assignments.

I still had some students disappear for a while due to personal issues; sometimes even the strongest grade incentives aren’t enough to get people to class. But overall I can’t believe I waited this long. I’m currently putting attendance as 10-15% of the course grade, but I dream about someday running a discussion-based class like a Liberty Fund seminar, doing a 100% attendance/participation grade, and not having to grade anything.

Compulsory Schooling by Gender & Age

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

This weekend I’ll be at the Southern Economic Association Conference in Houston Texas. I’m organizing and chairing a session called Education Policy Impacts by Sex (you should come by and see me if you will be there too!).

Personally, I will be presenting on the impact of compulsory school attendance laws on attendance. Today I just want to share and discuss a single graph that’s not my presentation.

Prior to my research, there was already a canon of existing literature on compulsory attendance legislation (CSL) and I’ve previously written on this blog about it (attendance, CSL, and differences by sex). However, the literature had some limitations. Authors examined smaller samples, ignored gender, or ignored different effects by age.

I examine full-count IPUMS data from the 1850-1910 US censuses of whites in order to investigate the so-far-omitted margins mentioned above. Here are some conclusions:

Prior to CSL:

  • Males and females attended school at similar rates until the age of 14.
  • After 14, women stopped attending school as much as men.
    • By the age of 18, the attendance gender gap was 10 percentage points.

After CSL

  • Male and female attendance increased from the ages of 6 to 14
  • Women began attending school more than prior to CSL until about age 18.
  • After the age of 18, women experienced no greater attendance than previously.
  • But, both sexes attended school less than prior to CSL for ages 5 and younger.
  • Men began attending school less after the age of 17.
  • CSL increased lifetime attendance for both males and females

Overall, examining the impact of CSL across many ages allows us to see when and not just whether people attended more school. Previous authors would say something like “CSL increased total years of school by about 5% on average”. For men, almost all of those gains were between the ages of 6 & 16. But women experienced greater attendance from ages 6 to 18.

Additionally, examining the data by age reveals that there was some intertemporal substitution. Once it became legally mandatory for children to attend school between the ages of 6 & 14, parents began sending their younger children to school at lower rates. Indeed – why invest in education for two or three early years of life if you’ll just have to send your children to school for another eight years anyway. Older boys dropped out of school at higher rates after CSL too. Essentially, the above figure became compressed horizontally. People ‘put in their time’, but then reduced investments at non-mandatory ages.

This reveals a shortcoming of the current literature, which focuses mostly on 14 year olds. By focusing on a popular age of attendance that was also compulsory, previous authors have missed the compensating fall in attendance at other ages. Granted, the life-time effect is still positive – but it’s attenuated by a richer picture. The picture reveals that individuals were not attending school by accident. Students or their parents had in mind an amount of educational investment for which they were aiming. When children were forced to attend school at particular ages, the attendance for other ages declined.

Wait for the Lower Cost Version of Policy

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

I’ve written previously about initial US state compulsory schooling laws in regard to literacy and in school attendance rates. I ended with a political economy hypothesis. Here’s the logic:

  1. Legislators like lower costs, all else constant (more funding is available for other priorities).
  2. Enforcing truancy and educating an illiterate populous is costly.
  3. Therefore, state legislatures that passed compulsory attendance legislation will already have had relatively high rates of school attendance and literacy.

That’s it. Standard political economy incentives. But is it true? Well, we can’t tell what’s going on in politician heads today, much less 150 years ago. Though, we can observe evidence that might corroborate the story. In plain terms, consistent evidence for the hypothesis would be that school attendance and literacy rates were rising prior to compulsory schooling legislation. The figures below show attendance and literacy rates for children ages 10 to 18.

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