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When given the opportunity to choose mandatory attendance or between two assessment styles, students in a study prioritized the more difficult option.
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Balancing higher standards in education and accommodations for students and learning is a difficult debate for higher education leaders and practitioners. Maintaining challenging courses and ensuring all students are learning and prepared for their next step after college is important, but how can faculty members balance rigor with students’ personal life challenges and outside stressors, all the while encouraging meaningful engagement in the classroom?
Two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University created two studies to understand how policies that allow student selection within the course impacted learning and motivation and found that, despite being given opportunities to disengage, students tended to select the more rigorous opportunities.
The article, published in the current issue of the journal Science Advances, points to how strict rules can be counterproductive in motivating students to learn and participate in the classroom.
The background: Prior research shows motivated students are more likely to persist, learn more and retain. Self-determination theory, which can inform classroom policies to improve student motivation, has three core elements: connectedness, mastery and autonomy.
Many classroom interventions focus on connectedness (inclusive teaching, peer connections, fostering a sense of belonging) or mastery (scaffolding curriculum, calibrating difficulty to build confidence), but fewer focus on student autonomy. In fact, many teaching and learning centers at universities recommend more structure, such as mandatory attendance or syllabus quizzes, which can undermine feelings of autonomy.
Researchers reviewed 13 prominent university teaching and learning centers’ websites and found, across about 2.2 million documents, terms related to mastery appeared 20 times more frequently than those linked to autonomy, while belongingness terms appeared 40 times more often.
“Some websites completely lacked discussion on student choice, while others argued against meaningful student autonomy, claiming that students’ underdeveloped metacognitive skills might undermine their own learning,” according to the study.
Prior research points to the positive effects of professors who are more supportive of student agency in their classes and student performance, enjoyment and interest in the course material.
Therefore, researchers argue for the development of autonomy-promoting interventions that encourage students to make wise decisions. To put these theories to the test, researchers created two policies that promote student autonomy in attendance and assessment.
Survey Says
Over 30 percent of in-person community college students said they skipped class sometimes, and 4 percent skipped classes often or very often in the past academic year, according to 2022 survey data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement.
Student choice in attendance: While class attendance is tied to student learning and higher GPA, students do not like mandatory attendance policies and give more favorable evaluations to courses with optional attendance and were more motivated to take such classes in the future, according to the study.
To address these issues, researchers propose an optional-mandatory attendance policy—which allows students to choose at the beginning of the term if their attendance will be a component of their grade. If students missed three or more classes, they would receive a 3 percent penalty on their final grade, but if students missed no more than three classes, they would receive a 3 percent bonus on their final grade.
“By deciding for themselves whether attendance will count, students who commit to mandatory attendance may reap the learning benefits of reliably showing up to class without suffering the motivational costs of controlling mandates,” the study authors wrote.
This model was adopted in five classes, ranging from 60 to 200 students, and around 73 to 95 of students chose mandatory attendance—with only 10 percent reporting regretting the decision.
The study did not track students who opted out of the mandatory attendance policy to preserve their perceptions of autonomy, so the study did not speak to their outcomes.
“It is worth remembering that mandatory attendance policies do not ensure perfect attendance: students still miss class,” the authors noted. “They just take penalties for doing so.”
Student choice in assessment: Providing regular assessment and timely feedback is part of effective teaching and learning, but students say high-stakes exams can stress them out. A 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found 46 percent of students want their college or university to rethink exam schedules or encourage professors to limit high-stakes exams to promote their overall well-being.
To induce students to work hard without causing undue stress, professors can give students greater control over how they are assessed, such as selecting between a problem-set assessment or an essay assessment.
Researchers studied an introductory philosophy course to see how a mandatory assessment of 20 argument-analysis problem sets throughout the term for all students or giving learners the option between the analysis problems or completing weekly reading questions, a midterm essay and final essay.
In the trial, 90 percent of students chose the problem set–based assessments, which researchers considered the more difficult option, and only 5 percent switched to the essay midterm option prior to the midterm.
Throughout the semester, researchers asked students how long they spent on the homework assignment and found, between both groups, students over all spent less time on their homework as the semester progressed. But those who had the option to pick their assessment were 3.6 times more likely to say they invested more time into their homework.
Students who chose to complete problem sets also had higher grades compared to their peers who were required to and had higher odds of achieving the highest mark with each assignment. Students who were required to do the assignments saw no significant improvement across submissions.
Researchers acknowledged that students who chose the less difficult option may have had less rigorous academic learning, but “it is not clear those students would have engaged more meaningfully with the material … It is not uncommon for students to fail to turn in required assignments and simply take the penalty for their grades.”
So what? The two experiments demonstrated to researchers that giving students choices meaningfully improved their engagement in class and with materials, as well as highlighted students’ tendencies to opt in to more difficult assignments and policies—a majority of students opted for a more demanding assessment option as well as mandatory attendance.
Some concessions should be made to the type of students who attend Carnegie Mellon, because it is a selective university known for attracting students with a strong work ethic, and all in the study were traditional-aged students. The study also affected students in introductory-level courses in the humanities and social sciences, which may have different effects on elective courses (because students opt in to the topic) or those that have more technical material.
However, creating personal autonomy in courses can help students in their education and beyond, by improving physical and mental health, teaching them how to be independent decision-makers, and giving them flexibility to balance careers, caregiver duties, activities and more, researchers wrote.
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