Final Blog Post
Thinking about the way attendance was governed I believe it did have an impact on my attendance rate. I feel I definitely had more will to show up to class when the bonus points were in effect at the beginning of the year as the five points were worth showing up to class and completing a quick survey afterwards, especially as these are things I should be doing already. Even though the points stopped halfway through the year I feel I showed up to more classes than I would have because of the earlier bonus points. I had gone to enough classes and had been interested enough to want to continue going to them, but even if I hadn't been interested I think I still would have gone to more classes after the points were discontinued as I had built a relationship with a class and felt somewhat obligated to continue showing up for most sessions.
This also makes me think about risk aversion. We talked about people choosing between two options, either being assured $10 or having a 50% chance to gain $20. Even though these have the same expected value people view these differently and have a preference. I think I have read an article that if this is phrased where instead of gaining money you instead lose it, a higher amount of people will choose the riskier option in order to try and avoid losing more money. This leads me to believe that if the class was structured in a way where you lost points based on attendance instead of gaining points (which is how most classes are governed), then with the theory above people should show up more if there was a negative effect on points if they didn't. I do not know if this would be true and I also haven't really tracked my behavior in different classes on this, so it would be something I would have to track in the future that I thought might be interesting.
As for the rule on electronic devices being used during class this did not effect me much at all. I have a laptop that I could bring to classes, but I simply prefer to use notebook and pen as I find it easier to look back on, and I think the act of writing notes down helps me remember and think about topics more than typing out things. On top of that it allows me the ability to draw things if needed, like arrows or graphs. As far as phone usage I put my phone on "do not disturb" before every one of my classes and don't use it except to maybe check the time once in a while. I definitely felt more reluctant to check for the time during the discussion sections, but overall I do not think the rules affected my behavior much as they did not cause me to change my behavior to follow them.
This also makes me think about risk aversion. We talked about people choosing between two options, either being assured $10 or having a 50% chance to gain $20. Even though these have the same expected value people view these differently and have a preference. I think I have read an article that if this is phrased where instead of gaining money you instead lose it, a higher amount of people will choose the riskier option in order to try and avoid losing more money. This leads me to believe that if the class was structured in a way where you lost points based on attendance instead of gaining points (which is how most classes are governed), then with the theory above people should show up more if there was a negative effect on points if they didn't. I do not know if this would be true and I also haven't really tracked my behavior in different classes on this, so it would be something I would have to track in the future that I thought might be interesting.
As for the rule on electronic devices being used during class this did not effect me much at all. I have a laptop that I could bring to classes, but I simply prefer to use notebook and pen as I find it easier to look back on, and I think the act of writing notes down helps me remember and think about topics more than typing out things. On top of that it allows me the ability to draw things if needed, like arrows or graphs. As far as phone usage I put my phone on "do not disturb" before every one of my classes and don't use it except to maybe check the time once in a while. I definitely felt more reluctant to check for the time during the discussion sections, but overall I do not think the rules affected my behavior much as they did not cause me to change my behavior to follow them.
I did just check my record of your attendance. You were around median for the class. Based on what some other students posted, there were some students who pretty much attended all the time, then others who came some of the time, and still others who came not much at all.
ReplyDeleteIn your particular case, what puzzles me, or example is this past week, where I thought you enjoyed class on Tuesday, yet you weren't there for the next session. This gets me to my critique of what you wrote.
My "goal" if you can call it that was to get you to come not out of extrinsic motivation at all, but because you wanted to come. I reasoned that at the beginning of the semester you wouldn't know that so then some extrinsic incentive was needed. But after a while, I hoped that incentive would become redundant. That should be the case for people who did come to the first several sessions.
Now where what you say may have some merit is for those students who skip class right off the bat (or after coming once or twice), but then don't drop. They have a different experience, so might require extrinsic rewards to get them to come to class.
This does leave a third category, of course. Student who do attend consistently but do so grudgingly. They never learn to like the class. The come for some other reason. Those students, I'm afraid, can never really learn about why gift exchange might be effective. They might be able to mouth the words. But they won't really understand.
My attendance definitely dropped off towards the end of the semester when bonus points were not in effect. Another factor specifically for me was that I would have class in the same building right before ours on Tuesday, but no class before our Thursday classes. It was very easy for me to show up on Tuesdays, but I would miss some Thursdays if I wasn't able to will myself up and this is likely shown in my attendance pattern. Another factor, though less important but still contributing, was I enjoyed walking through campus earlier in the year when it was nicer out, but less so when it got colder later in the semester. This changed from an enjoyable thing into a cost.
ReplyDeleteI think your comments about attendance were fairly similar to my thoughts. The difference in your experience is that because I had two classes directly after this one I would sometimes forget to do the quiz. Other than that my experience for the class was pretty much the same.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I feel that participation should be a part of the final grade. I feel it incentives students to attend class and also provide their own personal insights. I feel this is productive for the professor as well as he can gauge how the class is doing based on his lectures. My attendance was fairly common, but I could not take advantage of the fact of the bonus points as I kept on forgetting to do them. I would have preferred just writing comments on a piece of paper and turning them in directly after class.
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