Abstract:
Professors routinely struggle with student attendance in the classroom. Often students that struggle with the lecture material have the poorest attendance and those who excel generally have excellent attendance. Some professors address this dichotomy by using announced or unannounced daily quizzes taken solo or in pairs (dyad) as a means to improve student attendance. In this study we evaluated the effect of unannounced quizzes on student grades in an Introductory Soil Science class over two consecutive semesters (136 students total) at the University of Tennessee (UT) and compared it with results from six semesters (425 students total) in a similar Introductory Soil Science class at the University of Minnesota (UM) where attendance points are structured into the syllabus with daily lecture quiz dyads. Results clearly show that all UT students that earned A's missed no more than three lectures and that students that missed no lectures earned at least a B. Similarly, UM students that earned A's attended at least 80% of all lectures. Therefore, we conclude that giving announced or unannounced quizzes is beneficial to students with both excellent and poor attendance habits. Quizzes and exams positively affect student learning thereby suggesting that class time used for taking and reviewing quizzes and exams is fundamental to student learning and mastery of the subject matter.
Keywords:
skipping class
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