The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. This podcast episode is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our fifteenth episode is ‘student attendance in higher education’ and we hear from Jeanette Ashton (Associate Professor in Law), and Dr. C. Rashaad Shabab (Reader in Economics).
Recording
Listen to the recording of Episode 15 on Spotify
Wendy Garnham
Welcome to the Learning Matters Podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Attendance in Higher Education. Our guests are Jeanette Ashton, Associate Professor in Law and Dr Rashaad Shabab, Reader in Economics. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.
All
Hello, everyone.
Heather Taylor
What issues have you observed regarding student attendance in your modules or courses?
Jeanette Ashton
I think in terms of my particular modules, this term, they’re a little bit different. So I’ve got a new module which is called Professional Skills and I’ll talk about that a bit later, it’s a different approach, attendance and engagement has been really good and perhaps that’s because the module is a little bit different. I think from talking to colleagues in my department there’s been challenges with attendance in other modules and then we have the tension as well with the attendance now which has been made compulsory so whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, or somewhere in the middle, perhaps we’ll get into that a little bit later, but I think perhaps the prevailing view is that attendance is a challenge.
Rashaad Shabab
This is a crucially important question and one that we’ve struggled with quite a bit in the Business School. For the type of subjects that we have, it’s absolutely critical that students are in the room learning those skills and make learning how to sort of present, how to interact with other students and things like that. But what we have seen was that after COVID and specifically, there was a marked drop in the rate of attendance in classrooms. This is difficult, both as an educator because you want people to show up and it’s hard not to take it personally that they don’t see the value in my sort of being there, right?
But it’s also difficult, I think, for us as an institution, as a learning community, where so much of what we aspire to teach our students is from getting people from different backgrounds and different communities together to hash through the grand challenges of our time. And without having those different backgrounds in the room, those, particularly seminar and workshop sessions, lack the dynamism that they otherwise would have. So it’s definitely a challenge. It is something that has improved, I think, in the most recent cohorts. So in my classes now, I’m seeing a marked improvement, in attendance, but this may also be related to some work that we’ve done over the last 3 years in improving attendance, in the Business School. I think that’s something we might sort of come up come back to, in a later question. But, yes, I think there are there are lots and lots of difficulties that students seem to be facing, in terms of trying to get to class and being comfortable in class and being in a position where they feel like they’re making valuable and important contributions to class.
Jeanette Ashton
I think that’s really yeah, those are all really good points, Rashaad. Prior to this I asked my class that I was teaching who are, they’re a group of students who are studying what used to be known as the Law Conversion, so they’re post graduate students studying law so perhaps they’re not representative of our larger cohort which is of course undergraduate students and I thought well I’ll just ask you, I know I’m doing this podcast, I’ll ask you why are you here? And they didn’t share why they were here in an existential sense unfortunately but they did say that things that led them to come to the class was the timing of it, it was a nice time 11:00 not too early not too late. They also said that if the reading and the prep that they’re asked to do is useful and helps them to feel confident with the subject matter, they feel that they want to come, which I found really interesting. If they found or they felt that the class was going to be useful for them generally and particularly for their assessment. They also talked about if a class was such, delivered in such a way that they felt comfortable to come even if they weren’t fully prepared and that was really important. That they felt there was that enabling environment I suppose, that they wanted to come and that they weren’t going to feel too judged or picked on or whatever if they hadn’t done all of the work.
Wendy Garnham
I think that’s really important actually in terms of giving students that sort of confidence that actually there is something to be gained from attending – that it’s not just something you can do by looking at the slides online or looking at a recording that actually being physically present and engaging in a sort of a really, interactive way is absolutely key.
Rashaad Shabab
And I really like the point that you made, when you were sort of ending what you were saying about organising the class and the teaching session in such a way as to not alienate students who, for whatever reason, haven’t been able to do the reading. I think that’s really, really crucially important. I think sometimes we want to push students to do the reading. It is a very fine line. We want to reward the ones who do. We want to give them a voice and we want to make students feel like that effort is valued. But at the same time, if we emphasise that sort of too much or in a manner that pitches it as something that should be punished if it’s not done, then perhaps that can alienate students who for whatever reason are already struggling to engage. So I really, really think that’s a very important point. Thank you for making it.
Jeanette Ashton
I know and we don’t want to, you know, that cycle of disengagement then, someone doesn’t come and then they don’t come again, then it’s harder to come again, isn’t it? So you want to try and avoid that I guess.
Heather Taylor
Yeah. It’s so hard finding the balance I think, like, I know at the moment my students have got an assessment, well loads of assessments due, and they – I knew that they wouldn’t do the reading, and it was a deliberately short one. As I get towards their assessment period, I make the reading short. Well, I don’t make them obviously, but I pick ones that are short. So that it’s not going to take them too long to read it. But also, I literally had a situation where I think maybe two of the students in the class had done the reading. And so I knew this was going to happen. And part of me making it deliberately short was that they could read it in the lesson. So I was like, we can’t do the rest of the lesson till you’ve read it. These are the bits you have to focus on. We’re all going to read it now. And I’m a really slow reader. So I read it and I was like, by the time I’m done, everyone else should be done. And they were and it worked that way. And the ones that had already done the reading, it was fine because we had some more, like, discussion activities later on that they like to contribute to more, I’d say, than the other students anyway. So they could just discuss those with each other while we were going. But I think it’s really hard because you don’t want to say don’t bother doing the reading, you know, because it is annoying when you’ve set up a lesson a certain way, for that to be the case, for no one to do it. But, yeah, I think thinking about when are the pressure points for students in term, thinking about does it have to be such a long reading, does it have to be so tricky, can I factor in a bit of time in class to get them to do some of it, so, yeah? It’s like a tricky balancing act, isn’t it?
Rashaad Shabab
I think this is the core thing that I would like to get across to students, and I actually make a pretty deliberate attempt in a number of different structural ways to get this point across. We mention it at our induction events, I mention it in our first lectures, and I mention it repeatedly throughout, teaching events. Really, I think the first thing is you learn we’re human beings. We’re not we’re not sort of AIs that can just scan stuff, absorb the knowledge, and regurgitate it. And doing it that way does a disservice to what education is for. We learn as a community. We learn together with one another, and we learn not a very small fraction, but I’d say possibly half of what we teach in universities, when we take teaching in a holistic sense, is, you know, stuff that’s on a bit of paper. The rest of what students get out of a university education is from being present in that room with one another, From having sort of multiple, role models almost of professionals, of learned people who they can, sort of say that these are the behaviours, these are the attributes, this is how you run a room, this is how you manage a room, this is how you interact with a group of people who are different from you, who you don’t already know and, you know, don’t necessarily have lots and lots of other things in common with. I think those skills are sort of crucially important for students to pick up. I think it when students engage with the learning material in an interactive sense, and Wendy, I know you’ve done a lot of work on this, through the Active Learning Network. I mean, active learning is the best form of learning, and that a lot of that happens in the classroom.
So I think students are able to academically perform their best when they, attend class and when they’re exposed to the material in a number of different ways. Yes. They have the readings. Yes. They have the slides. Yes. They have the videos and things that we put up online. Yes. They have links to external sites. But also, they have that discursive, interactive, personal community element of the learning as well, which helps them get more out of it. So I think that – and the evidence is I mean, to me it seems incontrovertible that the students who have the best attendance do the best, the students who on average have the worst attendance tend to not do so well. There’s clear sort of empirical support for these assertions.
In terms of what people may be surprised to learn is that in terms of career progression, there’s also quite a lot of empirical support for, the idea that these soft skills have a premium. The Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, he won the Nobel Prize in the year 2000. He has a very influential paper that he called the Hard Evidence on Soft Skills. Right? And James Heckman is, I mean for economists who know, he is a hardcore, hard skills, you know, Nobel Prize winning economist in econometrics. So it’s not that he undervalues hard skills or that it’s not his particular sort of comparative advantage, but if even James Heckman can do a bunch of empirical work and come to the conclusion that the soft skills lead to career success and explain a significant portion of the variation that we see in people’s employment outcomes and wage outcomes, then I really think that’s really, really compelling.
There’s also some important evidence I think in terms of there’s university education in the public discourse is much maligned nowadays, but I think there’s really compelling evidence that actually going to university and doing it well and engaging with university provides very, very strong career payoffs. So I’ll just, float a few statistics your way if you don’t mind. These are from a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who found that the lifetime sort of earnings for people who go to university are £430,000 more for men, £260,000 more for women over their lifetimes. When you compare like for like, so people who could have gone to university but didn’t, so people who were otherwise similarly qualified at the high school level, at their A levels, then that premium drops. But it still remains a not inconsequential £240,000 for men and a £140,000 for women. So going to university and doing it right attracts a very, very significant premium. We’re joined in the room today, with, Jeanette, who’s from Law, so I’m sure she won’t mind me saying this, but, the IFS also found significant variation at the subject level, and subjects like, subjects like Medicine, Economics, and Law have the highest, premiums where, on average, women earn £250,000 more from going to university than if they didn’t, and men earn £500,000 more over their lifetimes.
Wendy Garnham
That’s so huge.
Rashaad Shabab
So these are these are huge premium. These are huge premium, and I think that if students had a better awareness and understanding of just how much university does pay off, I think they would probably be more interested in engaging in this. And also the idea that that a big chunk of that premium is down to the soft skills you learn while you’re here that you cannot learn just reading a paper and doing your work online remotely at home. You need to be in the room to learn those soft skills.
Heather Taylor (14:21)
Could you elaborate a bit on what the soft skills are?
Rashaad Shabab
Universities are hubs of social and economic mobility. We bring together diverse people from diverse backgrounds. Being in a room, learning to work with someone who’s different from you, someone who you might not otherwise connect with, someone who you might not share common things like your favourite movie or your taste in music or where you grew up. But when we all go into the place of work, I mean, it’s hugely diverse, and you need to have the capacity to effectively engage with people with whom you don’t share those sort of high school clique forming, characteristics. And a lot of what we learn in university is learning to interact with people on the basis of sort of something that defines you and unites your group, that is the academic experience, perhaps your subject specialism, perhaps, your shared motivations for building a better society, these things bring you together and they can give an opportunity for people to work toward a common goal even where those other underlying things aren’t there.
I also think it’s crucially important to know how to conduct yourself in a room full of people. I think it’s crucially important to know how to sit, how to, project your voice when you’re speaking, how to disagree with someone without being disrespectful, how to have meaningful exchanges about sort of ideas where you don’t agree with one another and yet be able to do that in a professional way. Every workplace, every managerial role will require people to have these skills. One cannot be an effective manager, one cannot be an effective business person, one cannot be effective in many forms of public service if they’re not able to have those skills. The power of a university is that you get really, really impressive individuals who are able to teach you those skills by embodying them and having them in front of a classroom, while also communicating very, very complex ideas that themselves are intellectually enriching.
Heather Taylor
I was just thinking while you while you were speaking, I was thinking about the fact that some people will listen to this and probably say, oh, but work’s remote now. Everyone works remotely now. You know? But I just think that, I completely agree with everything you’ve just said. And I think, actually, that the distance between people, even if you are working remotely, means that these soft skills need to be harnessed even better because there’s such room for, miscommunication and for things to get lost in emails and even in with the slight lag you get over Zoom. You know, it’s harder to read people and so on. So I think learning these things wherever possible in a real life, people are all together in a room situation enables you to better conduct yourself when you are communicating remotely, and better engage as well.
Rashaad Shabab
Great. I mean, if I could come in on that. I think the remote work is an important part of the economy now. But there is also a swing backwards of the pendulum with many managers, particularly in the kinds of companies where our students aspire to be, right, pushing back on remote work. And even if someone says, well fine, I’ll go for a job that allows me to work remotely, like you were saying, there was actually quite a bit of evidence generated during the pandemic that those micro cues are actually even more important when you’re online than when you’re in person. And being able to hone those skills in an in-person setting can be a much more sort of, supportive atmosphere to hone them than if you’re sort of left alone to do that in in a remote setting where the odds of someone misreading a micro expression. Right? The odds of someone – so people when you teach over Zoom, we had to be much more animated with our faces because we couldn’t use our sort of bodies and our hands or our physical presence in the way we would do, in a classroom. So there is quite a bit of sort of literature on that that sort of says, and the takeaway isn’t that we need these skills less, actually, if you want to be effective working remotely, chances are you might need these skills even more if you’re going to get a remote job to begin with.
Then there’s also the aspect that you want to grow in a career. We don’t want jobs, we want careers. And there’s a lot of evidence also within that Institute for Fiscal Studies report that showed that the premium to university education actually expands by the time people hit 40. Right? It gets even bigger. So you would underestimate it if you just focus on 30 or people at age 30. But what does that depend on? That depends on people being able to rise to managerial positions, being able to manage multiple conflicting sort of views and opinions, and being able to help the institution to move forward in a constructive way. And that again comes down to a combination of hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills alone might get you in the door, but they won’t help you with that rise, which is so important to making sure you benefit from the university premium.
Jeanette Ashton
Can I just jump in on the soft skills point as well? So just to, yeah, build on all those really, crucial points, Rashaad, so I’m one of the employability leads for the Law School and we have an annual employer advisory board and so the idea of it is obviously to feed into the curriculum, to help us to shape learning so that students get the skills that they’re going to need both as you’ve said to Rashaad to get the job but also to thrive in the job. So a lot of what they tell us really is all about young lawyers being too scared to pick up the phone, speak to clients, they all want to hide behind emails and what can we do to encourage that. So what we’ve done sort of bearing that in mind, and I mentioned this already, we’ve got a new Professional Skills Law in Action module, it’s different because it doesn’t have any substantive law attached to it, it’s situated in the context of law and there’s lots of activities that are law-related but, from the beginning of the module the students set themselves up in law firms, they work together every week, there are no lectures it’s all workshops, they define the law firm’s mission and who their clients are and what they want to do and so throughout the whole module which we’ve just nearly finished the first iteration, they’re working in that sort of professional way.
Now embedded in the module is consultancy work so they have spent 3 weeks working on a brief, a live brief for local organisations, so charities in the community. So it’s legal research but they’ve worked on that in their law firms and they have met the organisations, they’ve got the briefs and they have presented back to them and produced some deliverables. Interestingly they’ve had to do all of those things that Rashaad talked about. They’ve had to manage their own team, their own role within the team inevitably there are you know some conflicts that need to be worked through but they all did it, they met the deadline, they did their presentations and the feedback from the organisations has been has been really fabulous, and one of the things the students did which we kind of underestimate this, because we write and receive emails all the time but what they really one of the things they really valued was that we and we cleared it with the organisations, the students sent the deliverables to the organisation so we gave them – you know, we explained how they should write, dear, it was a pleasure working with you but we allowed them to put their own spin on it and that just kind of engaging, meeting professionals, you know being given that level of responsibility has been really powerful for them and they and it’s just been a pleasure really, modules I designed with my colleague, Verona Ni Drisceoil, who I know Wendy knows really well and it’s just been an absolute pleasure because just watching them develop these skills and I think some of the students who selected this module, it’s optional, so we’ve got 60 which was our maximum around 60 at level 5, so second years were perhaps those students who weren’t perhaps the most confident students, that they felt they needed to develop these skills and it’s just been it’s just been so enriching and rewarding.
The assessment is coming up soon and that is they’ve had a 20% participation and engagement on the consultancy work and the rest of it is a work in progress interview where they come to us, they’ve produced a piece of legal drafting and they have to talk through their process, it’s all about the process and then they have to – there’s a fictional role at the law firm that’s come up and they have to showcase their skills and suitability for that role So it’s very, yeah, concerned with process, it’s obviously – and we’ve told them, yeah, okay you can use AI to generate your letter, Go for it. We’ve done some work in the module on, a sort of critical approach to AI. But I said, you know, you can knock out this letter in 5 minutes, but you’re going to be in front of us and we’re going to be asking you some questions about it. So, you know, your choice. So I think, yeah we’ve got the assessments coming up so you know we’ll see how they go but I think the students are just really looking forward to the chance to just have that conversation and do something different so yeah I think absolutely soft skills.
And then that leads to networks and I remember as a trainee solicitor the managing partner at the time saying you know the people that you are with now, your fellow trainees they’re your networks right, they’re going to be your networks for life and I think that’s part of it as well. So those relationships that students build, that we build with them. We might know someone and a student will talk to us about a career aspiration. Oh great if you connect with on LinkedIn and then perhaps you know can you ask them – can I have a 10 minute chat with you – and then things build from there and you only get that from coming in. You don’t get that from you know from not. So, yeah? I totally agree with Rashaad’s points on that.
Heather Taylor (00:26:03)
Oh, yeah. That’s such a good authentic assessment by the way. Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing is great, but I really like the fact that at the end you do a really authentic assessment that’s actually going to benefit them where they can put their skills into it Yeah. That’s great.
Jeanette Ashton
Yeah. Yeah. And what we’ve done as well, which is quite, well it’s different. We’ve done exit tickets for every week. So the exit ticket, you know, the premise is you have to complete it to leave the class. Obviously we don’t lock them in you know we do let them leave, but the exit ticket isn’t we allow them to provide feedback if they want to on the sessions. Great because it’s the first iteration of it but it’s what’s the takeaway and what skill have you worked on and the idea of that is to help them with the assessment and get the buy in with that because they know they’ve got to showcase their skills but also it just really enables them to be reflective. And we talk about that and being reflective and it’s just a sort of mini easy way for them to do that so it’s gone really well like beyond I think what we’d, well probably what we’d hoped but it’s been yeah it’s been great, we’ve loved it.
Wendy Garnham
It’s really interesting actually hearing that because I’ve just been trialling this year with my foundation students a badge scheme to sort of help them to recognise all the soft skills so they get a badge for, well 1 week we did a well-being badge so they had to show that they were considering their well-being alongside their academic work by doing something to promote their sense of well-being. And another week it was all about learning how to reference properly, another week it might be being creative, so showing their creativity. I mean there’s a whole range of these badges and I did a review with them last week just to sort of see what their feelings were about this scheme and it was really positive but it was really interesting, it wasn’t necessarily in the sense that I thought it would work which was for them to recognise all these skills that they’re developing, it was actually motivation was the key thing they talked at. They found it really motivating in terms of trying to get the badges and trying to get the full quota and so it made them want to attend and it made them want to engage, whereas I thought it would be oh you know now I recognise all these soft skills.
So I think it’s sort of tied up together that actually part of the process of developing those soft skills is quite often just being motivated to sort of have a go, to take part, to participate and if you can sort of – if you can foster that then you can develop all these soft skills really quite easily but effectively. But yeah it just really, it was quite interesting because I thought you know I thought it might motivate them a bit but I thought that the value for them might be in just helping them to recognise the soft skills but it was the reverse, it was the motivation that was the biggest factor they talked about and the recognition it was like oh 50% you know sort of helped me recognise the skills almost as though they sort of already sort of could see what the skills were through being motivated to participate so that’s interesting stuff.
Rashaad Shabab
That is fascinating. I mean it reminds me of this literature on gamification, right, where you take techniques from video game design and you implement that in in education. But you’ve done it in a way there that just make giving that little incentive helps them overcome whatever sort of subliminal barriers there may have been to that engagement. It lets them sort of achieve those skills even though they wouldn’t have been able to overcome that barrier or some of them wouldn’t have been able to overcome that barrier, knowing full well what the skills are because you’re saying that’s not necessarily where the gap that was filled. It’s just that little nudge to help them get over the barrier to engage.
Wendy Garnham
Definitely. It’s even things like, you know, submitting work to get feedback, you know, just getting a badge, you know, even if you’re thinking, oh, I feel a bit sort of despondent about putting my work in or uploading it which a lot of students surprisingly are quite you know sort of nervous about submitting their work for feedback but if you say right you know if you do this you get a badge you know that’s your badge for actually sort of being willing to sort of open up your work for feedback you know and so I had a lot more formative feedbacks which did mean a lot more marking but that’s another story but you know it just – I think that motivation factor we often sort of forget that when they’re attending it’s quite motivating for them to sort of see the opportunities that it opens up and the sort of you know, the way that attending actually is facilitating their learning of all these skills as a sort of a byproduct of that. But, yeah, it is really interesting.
Heather Taylor (00:31:01)
Jeanette, at the beginning, I know you spoke about you asked your students why they were here, so why they attended your session, but on the reverse of that, in your view, what do you think are the main factors that contribute to attendance challenges?
Jeanette Ashton
Inevitably, students are having to do paid work more. There are financial challenges and I think that I know, I know it’s hard, I know it’s challenging timetabling but I think students are not going to come onto campus for 1 hour in a day when they could do paid work and all of the lovely initiatives we do you know the breakfast clubs, the lunch drop ins with food etcetera, is not going to cut it. So I think that is a really big challenge and one that one feel we need to do something about and I think the thing we could most do about that is you know maybe having a little look at the at how timetabling all works, I know it’s really difficult but if students knew ahead of time right in the week I’m coming in 3 days or even 4 and I can work on that other day as well as the weekends I think that would be really helpful.
I think the other, challenge is like I said earlier if some students feeling you know if I’m not prepared depending on who the tutor is they might not feel able to come in, they might feel that they’re going to get, you know, picked on or they’re going to, feel kind of, discouraged from coming along. I think other another challenge is, generative AI inevitably and I think it’s really important that we look at our assessments. I know we’re looking at that but you know inevitably there are going to be some students who don’t come in and you know think and impact rightly so that they can they can work their way through the degree with using ChatGPT and that is something that I know, obviously, the whole sector is wrestling with. So that’s so that’s another point.
And I guess you know just basic things like do they feel a sense of belonging? I think one of the things on the new module, sorry I’m just so excited about it that’s why it’s the one I’m talking about, but where in that module they work with the same students every week. We did ask them – we sort of did a midway bit of feedback – and one of them said he said – and he’s a personable you know outgoing, young man – and he said, ah, I didn’t make any friends on my course last year, that was first year, but I’ve, like, made some really good friends and I thought, well, that says it all, doesn’t it? So actually, you know, you’re much more likely, like Rashaad was saying about forming connections, you’re much more likely to come in if you’re going to be working with people that you like and that you, you know, and that you get on with. So, yeah, I think all of those things and there’s probably a multitude more.
Wendy Garnham
It’s like that value thing isn’t it, it’s the value added bit of attending, you know what is it that you’re getting from attending that you wouldn’t get without, you know that you would get just from using online things because I think that’s one of the things I think students under appreciate a lot of the time, if they say you know I’m not able to attend but it’s okay because I’ll just look at the slides on Canvas – no you’re sort of you’re missing that value added bit. But, yeah, that is quite a common thing.
Rashaad Shabab
That connection is so important. There’s also evidence from, network analysis in economics that finds that who do you think you’re more likely to get a job sort of connection from? Someone who you’re very close to? Who’s your sort of childhood friend? Or someone who you kind of sort of met, maybe had a class with, maybe did an assignment with and then haven’t spoken to in a while? The answer is it’s actually the second one. It’s the weak social bond who’s more likely to land you that job interview because with your close connections, you share all the same network and the same information to begin with. So they don’t give you any new information. But it’s that weak social bond. It’s building those weak social bonds that help you to secure new opportunities and feed new information into your network. I think it’s an absolutely crucial part of what universities do in our sort of public mission, right?
There’s, just last week I was giving a lecture on intergenerational mobility and what factors, sort of improve intergenerational mobility within certain communities, versus others. And there was this fantastic paper published in Nature by Raj Chetty and his co-authors and what this paper basically found using sort of scraping masses of data from Facebook, using census data, using local level economic data, data on volunteering and all of this sort of wonderful stuff, They found that what matters most for making a community have higher intergenerational mobility, meaning that you get to where your child winds up in the income distribution is less determined by where you are in the income distribution. That’s what I mean by intergenerational mobility. The most powerful factor for that is how diverse are people’s friendship groups, economic connectedness. Do you have people from different socioeconomic backgrounds in your friends group?
And I think, you know, whether you’re on the left or the right, almost everybody agrees that, greater degree of equality of opportunity is something that we should strive for as a society. Universities play a crucially important role in helping society achieve that goal because we bring so many diverse people together and we enable those friendships to be formed. So it’s a crucial part of our social mission and the social value that we bring universities as engines of upward social mobility.
But if students don’t come to class and if they rob themselves of the opportunity to make those diverse friends, they’re robbing themselves of the opportunity for who may have been their business partner, who may have been the connection that landed them that job interview, who may have been their life partner. Right? You’re robbing yourself of all of these opportunities and you’re weakening the university’s and society’s ability to foster higher intergenerational mobility.
Wendy Garnham (00:38:02)
So Jeanette, what strategies or interventions have you implemented to encourage or support student attendance?
Jeanette Ashton
That’s an interesting one. I suppose that’s, I would say that that’s, department kind of level and I guess university level as well. So I mentioned right at the beginning, we have the compulsory attendance in lectures now. Now in Law, that wasn’t compulsory, there wasn’t the pin and all of that, so we have that, I guess that’s a strategy that has encouraged attendance, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s encouraged engagement but I haven’t been doing any of the big lectures on the big core modules this time around. So that’s one strategy, I guess it’s the whole piece isn’t it? It’s helping students to feel they belong I think and we have a lot of initiatives in Law, in, LPS and the Faculty of Social Sciences, I think there’s a lot of that work going on, yeah and I suppose for the, for my own modules I’ve got pretty good attendance I would say but I think my modules this term are, one of them is Street Law which is part of our clinic and Street Law is a public legal education and we go out into the community and we deliver sessions on you know on the law of interest and the students design those and you know, get out there and deliver them.
So their seminars at 09:00, they’ve all come to all of them because they have to, because they have to practice their sessions because they’re going out to Varndean we’ve done some sessions with. We were in a school in Billingshurst last week working with friends, families and travellers and those young people so they kind of have to because if they don’t come they can’t get out there in front of people and have a positive experience so that sort of drives its own engagement I think and I think the people who select that module they know what they’re in for so you kind of you’re going to get those ones.
Yeah I don’t know about other strategies I suppose we’re always trying to make the case a challenge for me and I know it’s not in in terms of classes but as one of the employability leads a big challenge is getting students along to events that we know are going to be, well they are brilliant, we have an amazing array of events with practitioners and sometimes I feel that I’m spending most of my day doing posts on Instagram, cajoling students, persuading them to come and they do, but I sometimes feel why am I having to do this because it’s so great and you’re going to have such an amazing time and it’s going to be so beneficial. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know, you know, no one’s nailed it, have they, here or anywhere else?
Rashaad Shabab
It is something that, you know, the whole sector, I think, struggles with and I think it’s also something that we we’ve struggled with in the Business School as well. We’ve tried a few things at the Business School level. So, for the last 3 academic years, I was responsible for, sort of our duty of care to students and overall student experience and things like that. And, when we were tracking the data, we actually found that there were a couple of 100 students in the Business School alone who hadn’t attended any seminars or workshops. And that is absolutely astonishing. And we realised very quickly that we needed to reach out to these students. Something was going terribly wrong there. Right? So we have a process called the School Student Progress Panel, where we, sort of ask students to come in who are of very serious concern, and we have a chat with them. A group of academics has a chat with them to figure out how we can help them to re-engage. We had to scale those up. In the year before I went into the Student Experience role, there were only 80 of those in the business school. But within a couple of years, we had to scale it up to 282 SSPPs in one academic year.
Jeanette Ashton
I think that might have been rolled out across the University because we have that now. I know because one of my, students was going along to one of those. So I don’t know if that’s it’s a university wide.
Rashaad Shabab
Yeah. I think it yeah.
Wendy Garnham
My understanding is it still is. But, yeah, certainly we used to have them in Foundation not to the same extent but they are actually really really positive meetings. It sounds as though it’s like a sort of a discipline thing but it’s really not. I mean my experience of them was that quite often students had been really not attending because of some really quite serious issues that actually we have a lot of support available for and that meeting would be like a turning point where actually you’ll say oh you know we can put this support in place and we can do that that might help and we can alleviate that issue and the student leaves with this completely different perspective. And yeah for a lot of students it did turn them from serial non-attenders to attending.
Jeanette Ashton
It’s an early intervention isn’t it? It’s not waiting until the end when they’ve attended nothing, done you know not very well and are feeling thoroughly demoralised, it’s getting in earlier.
Wendy Garnham
Definitely. It was sort of the basis of our donut model that I’ve talked endlessly about but it was one of our award winning initiatives which was entirely based on that idea of like we have to reach out to the students because particularly students who are really sort of struggling with some pretty significant issues are unlikely to find the time to come and seek us out to try and explain what’s happening but actually us reaching out to them gives them that opportunity really easily to sort of say well yeah actually I am really struggling and you know, and it just it really enabled us to sort of develop a very rounded holistic view of what was happening with our students and what support we might need to develop or and that sort of thing. But, yeah, it is, I think it’s critical.
Heather Taylor
Sometimes as well, it’s about, for the students through these meetings that actually, like, we all have this in life, sometimes everything is too much, and they need to take some time out. And they, and the nice thing about these is it SSPP? Yeah. I hate acronyms, with these meetings, anyway, is that often, the student, with the support from the staff, will actually come to these decisions on their own in a sort of empowered way where they don’t go, oh, I’m going to have to drop out because I can’t do this. They actually feel supported, so they take temporary withdrawal. They come back, and when they come back, it’s like a new person has come back, because they’ve taken the time out to go, these are the things I couldn’t deal with while studying, or these are the things that, you know, studying impacted in my life. And, you know, some of the students have gone on to, like, really do amazingly, haven’t they, from taking that time out. And obviously, we don’t really want people to be withdrawing. Obviously, we’ll try and support them first and foremost, but sometimes, like, that is the right decision, and we’ll support them in helping them come to their decisions around that. And it can be yeah. Really it’s a really beneficial, system. I don’t know if I could do as many as 200 you know?
Rashaad Shabab (00:45:49)
We’ve actually been tracking the data on that. We’re writing up a paper that looks at it in a more structured way, but the preliminary analysis suggests that for at least half of those students, there was a significant increase in attendance and engagement after that. Some of them, yes, there were chronic issues that they needed to address before they could meaningfully engage with their studies. And in those cases, we do – usually in consultation with the student, we’re able to say, well, maybe taking a bit of time off is good for you now. And they say, I didn’t even know we could do that. Right? And they feel empowered and relieved by that. I could think of quite a few cases where, a student got back to me, you know, afterwards and said, I know that two years later, I know that was a difficult conversation to have and it couldn’t have been pleasant, but I just wanted to let you know I’ve graduated with a 2:2 and I couldn’t have done it without that conversation, thanks.
Heather Taylor
Yeah.
Rashaad Shabab
So, yeah, I think universities, we have a duty to really try to sort of, support these students proactively. There are things we can also do in our classroom. Like you were saying, I think, one of the things I’ve done in my class is from the beginning, I let them know that, you know, it’s a safe space. It’s meant for trial and error. Better to get it wrong here than in the exam. You know, we’re here to discuss issues of inequality and things like that. I wanted to do an icebreaker in the beginning where I just asked students, why did you take this module? So that they would, sort of become accustomed to speaking to one another before having to get into really technical, econometric stuff and statistical stuff.
I noticed that a couple of students still didn’t attend, and then I reached out to them at week 3. I said, why haven’t you been attending? One of them said, I got so scared at the idea of having to say why I chose this class, but I didn’t come, and I felt bad going back. And I said, look, I don’t have to call on you. You don’t have to participate. It’s fine, but please do just come along. And since then, that student has been attending.
So I think just showing them that we care, we value them, and it matters, And be that through institutional structures or through individual conveners in our personal teaching, having that shine through, like you were saying, I think it really matters. And of course, there are things like timetabling, and student finance that also really matter here.
I’ll just do a quick little plug about what you’re saying about chronic disengagement. There’s a – I wrote a paper on understanding mathematics anxiety that uses behavioural economics to sort of develop a theory of mathematics anxiety and how students fall into this chronic pattern potentially of disengagement. And the key takeaway from that paper was that chronic disengagement isn’t necessarily chronic, indicative of chronic apathy. Right? Quite often it’s students who care profoundly about their degrees, it’s students who care profoundly about how they’re perceived, who are really really scared and uncomfortable about their academic prospects, who disengage to begin with. And if we can remove some of the threat they feel around that and approach them with some support, then we can really potentially turn those academic careers around. So teaching mathematics and its applications that’s the journal have it written.
Wendy Garnham
I think it’s that sort of fear of failure isn’t it? That’s quite a big player I think in attendance. It’s just we’ve learned that it’s not good to fail where in fact failure is like the root of really effective learning you know that’s the thing that really promotes the best learning – is if you failed you know how to sort of rectify things, you learn really effectively but I think there is, and not just in students I think also in faculty as well there is still this risk aversion and that sort of fear of failure so I think sometimes it’s really good for us to share our experiences so that the students feel more comfortable if they sort of see that there’s this real aversion to risk themselves that actually they can see well actually this is pretty common but at the same time it’s really good to move beyond that and to take the risk and perhaps to fail and at the end of it to end up with this better sort of sense of learning at the end.
So it’s very apt you mention that because I had to take extra lessons to get my Maths O level that’s how old I am and you know I just I really really struggled with maths, really struggled with maths but it was that sense of like I didn’t want to do it because that fear of failure was enormous whereas actually taking those additional, well I didn’t have a choice I had to take the extra lessons, but that enabled me to sort of move a little bit beyond that. I’m still not very good at maths at all but I don’t fear it in the same way that perhaps I feared it initially so I think sometimes it’s good to sort of you know just share with students that this is a really common feeling but actually moving beyond that is really helpful.
Jeanette Ashton (00:51:09)
Also I think the point on the overcoming something, that’s what we hear all the time from employers, and they say that this in the sessions with the students who are there who obviously benefit enormously, they’ll say you know we want to hear that stuff we don’t want to hear necessarily how you’ve sailed through life and you’ve sailed through everything. The interesting things for us are you know how something was a challenge, how things were going on but you know the things you did to overcome it, so that is obviously overcoming something and failing and learning is good in itself but also for going forwards and you know securing a role and moving onwards it’s also really important for that as well isn’t it? So it’s just getting that across I think.
Wendy Garnham
I think so and just acknowledging that you know there will be difficult things that you are – given a difficult task to try or you know different projects to work on that might you know create some sort of difficulty for you but it’s, the more you sort of practice again going back to those soft skills the more you sort of can network and you feel happy to approach people to ask questions to help you make progress the more effective you become.
My son has just very recently learnt that, doing an internship at Barclays, and he was given a task where he said I really don’t know where to start with this, however I’m going to go to this person and I’m going to go to that person, I’m going to sort of seek some ideas and he managed to sort of resolve that issue and actually you know completed that task really effectively but it was only through taking the initiative to sort of use these soft skills that he’d developed through his degree that he was able to actually do that, but you know at the starting point it seemed like this really impossible task, this really difficult task and you know his confidence, you know, was really quite low in terms of his ability to do it and I think sometimes that’s where attendance can play a massive role, is the more you attend the more it gives you the confidence to know, you know, I’m not going to know all the answers however it’s knowing how you can use your community to help you find the answers or you know knowing that if you don’t know the answer that’s not the end of the world like we were saying about not reading the papers, you know, if you haven’t been able to read the paper that week for whatever reason you might not know all the answers but the idea is that you come into a community where you can seek answers from each other, you can sort of look at shared understanding, it might even shape your understanding of what you read later, so sort of looking at different perspectives, different ideas is actually a really rich sort of, outcome from attending I think.
Heather Taylor (00:53:53)
Rashaad, starting with you then, based on your experience, what advice would you give to colleagues who are also working to support student attendance?
Rashaad Shabab
We really need to be clear about why we think attendance is a good idea, but also I think it’s very tempting sometimes to draw from our own experiences in a way that doesn’t necessarily resonate with students. I think there is, an issue of selection, shall we say, in who becomes a university lecturer or professor or something like that. We do tend to be people who are academically inclined sort of from the get-go, and the way that we see things isn’t necessarily the way our students see things. Many of my colleagues are brilliant and have been brilliant their whole lives, and that’s why they’re at the top of their profession. That’s why they’re the star researchers, and that’s why they’re at, you know, the University of Sussex. Right?
My journey has been somewhat more mixed. I have endured success, failure, difficulty, impediments, and all of that. Most of my impediments, I have to say, were of my own making. Right? But I had to overcome them nevertheless. And I think that what really helped me connect with students was reflecting on those impediments that I myself faced and how it sort of, you know, I’m still the same person, but I show up. What was it that stopped me from showing up? I know what that fear feels like. I know what those sweaty palms when someone asks you sort of a simple derivative and you don’t know what it is and you have to answer it in front of a class. And I know what it’s like to then be terrified of that and not go back to class.
So I would ask colleagues to potentially consider, the student point of view about, well, what might it be like for someone who, and let’s not jump to judgment about people’s effort or intent. I think, very often, what – one of the things I learned, as the Director of Student Experience for the Business School doing these SSPPs was just how varied and difficult it can be to be a young person today, to be a student today, to be, from a different background. Right? From various different backgrounds today. I think the cross section of human experience that our students represent is incredibly wide and incredibly rich, but within that, there’s also a great deal of lived experience that is genuinely difficult. People genuinely overcome significant obstacles that I would not have imagined had I not been in that role. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a classroom the same way again because before where I saw a student who comes in 5 minutes late and sits in the back corner and doesn’t contribute, I would judge them in a particular way. But now having met that student at an SSPP, understanding what she’d been through, understanding what had happened to her, and understanding what it took for her to continue to set foot on this campus and show up in that room, it’s been transformational. And that’s one student, but each of those 282 students I met you know, we met that year, each of them has a significant barrier. Right? Something significant they had to overcome. Some are more legitimate than others. Right? There’s a handful within that that we might say, well, actually, you really just need to, you know, show up and do less of whatever else it is you’re doing. Right? But, but overall, nobody signs up to come to university, goes into a massive amount of debt, and then chooses not to use it. Right?
So I would ask people to approach this knowing what the limits of our knowledge are, knowing that we don’t know what’s happening in each particular situation. We shouldn’t extrapolate too much from our own lived experience because there’s a danger with that, and extending, sort of support, extending offers of help. Now sometimes you do need to say that there are consequences if this doesn’t happen. But it can be helpful to say I’m here to help you avoid those consequences, but if you don’t take my help and you don’t do something about this those consequences will come for you nevertheless. But putting ourself in a position of someone who’s there to support and help students, and I think the vast majority of my colleagues would think of themselves, in that way. So I’d ask them to lean into that instinct.
Heather Taylor
Yeah. I think as well, I think it’s really important not only to I guess, like, your suggestion really is we should rather than assuming students can’t be bothered, and that’s why they’re not coming, it’s good to give them the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge all of the things that we don’t know. But I think it’s also important for us definitely, I need to remind myself of this sometimes, to recognise, like, my sort of knee jerk reaction to being, you know, putting a lot of work, a lot of effort into something, and then being offended or hurt by an empty room. Well, not empty, but, you know. You have to be kind to yourself because you’re a human too, right, it’s not just about being kind to the students. But I think acknowledging that, oh, hang on a minute. I’m interpreting something here that means that I have – either they can’t be bothered and they’ve failed me or, and/or I have failed them in some way because if I haven’t done a good enough job, they’re not engaging because my content isn’t engaging enough or you know what I mean? It’s really easy to get into those little, the same as with the students that, oh, I’ve missed this. Everyone’s going to think I’m stupid. They’re going to ask me questions. I’m not going to know the answer. All the students who miss sessions always seem to think that there’s these fantastic friendship groups that exist within the seminar that literally do not. Like, they all talk to each other and are fine, but it’s not like they’re this really bonded group. You know? But a lot of the students that miss sessions make those assumptions. But I think it’s easy for us as the teachers to make our own assumptions about ourselves and the situation. So, yeah, I think that’s also really important to, remember.
Jeanette Ashton
I agree with all of those points. I think just as well as just some sort of basic things, just be personable you know how we are is so important which is kind of what you’ve both said so I think you know being personable, being encouraging, all of that but still have boundaries because we’re still you know professionals at the end of the day but just being yeah something that they want to come and you know and spend some time with.
I think as well it all comes down to building an enabling environment and that might be the way the classrooms are structured, so the module that I’ve talked about the Professional Skills module it’s all cafe style you know, it’s small tables and I think that works better for everything because if students are feeling oh they haven’t prepared enough etcetera and they’re sitting around in a horseshoe and everyone’s staring at you they’re not going to want to speak but if you’ve got them in small groups and you can sort of, you know, listen to what they’re saying and then you’re not you’re not picking on someone you’ve heard somebody oh Wendy I heard you say that that was a really interesting point would you mind sharing it, that’s more enabling than everyone sitting around in a horseshoe and you zoning in on someone so I think there’s some real basic things that everybody can do and, you know, it’s just an ongoing process isn’t it trying to get students along and hopefully the more they come the more they see the value and you get a kind of virtuous circle.
Wendy Garnham (01:02:34)
That’s an important point actually about the sort of, the arrangement of the class because I think those sort of horseshoe arrangements or you know the lined up desks like an exam, I think students feel sometimes when they come into that room that the spotlight is going to be on them you know and I mean it’s there’s a well-known phenomenon the spotlight effect which is this feeling that everybody is looking at you when in fact people probably spend far less attention on you as an individual than they do on themselves and their own contribution, you know people are thinking about their own sort of position within the group more.
But I do think that one of the things certainly that I found has helped that sense of sort of a more relaxed atmosphere in the class is if you give them something to look at or to work on or something to focus on so that you’re avoiding that spotlight effect so you know when they’re talking they’re talking with something in front of them or you’re getting them to do something with something in front of them rather than just that sort of bland asking questions where they sort of suddenly think oh the spotlights are on me, everybody’s looking at me, oh now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say, you know that sort of stressy environment, I think that’s one of the things that I think is really, I mean it’s still not a foolproof method but I think it helps to contribute to that sort of relaxed atmosphere and just making it fun as well I think you know if you if you have a sort of a fun sort of session then I think that does draw students to want to attend. Learning should be fun.
Heather Taylor
I would like to thank our guests Jeanette and Rashaad.
All
Thank you for having us.
Heather Taylor
So good. And thank you for listening. Goodbye. This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes, as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit blogs.sussex.ac.uk forward /learning-matters.
