Cover image by Ulrich from Pixabay
By Megan Sumeracki
In today’s post, I want to share a cool, relatively new paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer from Science Advances (1). The paper is titled, Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. The methodology is neat, the results are interesting, and while this paper used a higher education sample, I think educators teaching other grade levels might be able to take something from this (even if not the exact intervention).
The authors (1) note that autonomy enhances student motivation and achievement, yet many policies that are frequently adopted and even recommended by university teaching and learning centers, like mandatory attendance, mandatory drafts, etc., can undermine feelings of autonomy. They went as far as to critically analyze 13 prominent centers for teaching and learning at well-known universities and found that there was very little, if any, discussion or recommendations related to student choice. Some even argued against meaningful student autonomy. The authors argue that autonomy may benefit college students.
The purpose of the studies in the paper was to test whether policies that support student autonomy improve student outcomes. They present two studies. One was a randomized controlled field study examining the effects of allowing students to choose whether their attendance was mandatory. The other was a multi-year cohort study examining the effects of allowing students to opt out of challenging, high-effort assessments.
Today, mandatory attendance.
Study 1: Mandatory vs. Optional Attendance
The Method
This study was a randomized controlled field study testing the effects of allowing students to choose whether to make their own attendance mandatory (i.e., part of their grade). The study was conducted with college students taking a large Gen-Ed Philosophy course at Carnegie Mellon University. Students in the course were enrolled in discussion sections taught by TAs (teaching assistants). Each TA had two discussion sections, one randomly assigned to have a mandatory attendance policy with the other having an optional-mandatory policy. The TAs did not know what the hypothesis for the study was.
In the mandatory attendance sections, the TAs told the students that attendance at recitations would count toward their final grade. They were permitted to miss up to three recitations, and if they missed only three sessions or fewer, they had 3% added to their final grade. If they missed more, they had 3% subtracted from their final grade.
In the optional-mandatory sections, the TAs told the students that they got to choose if you would like attendance at recitations to count toward their final grade. If they chose for it to count, then the policy was applied in the same way as the mandatory policy. They were permitted to miss up to three recitations, and if they missed only three sessions or fewer, they had 3% added to their final grade. If they missed more, they had 3% subtracted from their final grade.
