Why don’t students attend classes? A study by Samuelsson et al. (2025)

In many studies, student attendance of scheduled teaching activities has been found to correlate with student success. However, attendance pattern got majorly disrupted with the Covid-19 pandemic, and seem to not have gone back to “normal” levels and even declining, and many teachers perceive this as a bad sign. At the same time, academic achievements have not suffered as much as one might have expected, so maybe there is more to the story. That is what my colleagues Samuelsson et al. (2025) investigate in “Students’ Reasons for Absence in First-cycle Engineering Education – an Interview Study” here at LTH.

In their interview study, they find a (self-reported) bimodal distribution: Students tend to either not attend, or attend about 80% of the time. Attendance is decided based on students’ backgrounds, external factors related to the course, the campus environment, and student-specific reflections and learning strategies.

• Background filters are
  • prior study experience and expectations: What do students believe about how you study engineering, and about what is good for learning? And based on that, what kind of behaviours have they formed? Many students that do attend (most of) the classes do that based on the habits formed in high school, where attendance was compulsory, and students generally believe that attendance is good for learning. But students report that they have very little opportunity to develop new strategies and habits since they immediately have to function in the university context, so as long as things worked out, they did not want to change a running system. Students also optimize studying during times that work with their biorythm, so for example avoiding early mornings. Some students quickly form opinions on for example exercise sessions (“too noisy”), that then lead to consistent absence.
  • learning measured by time spent: Students all feel that they need to manage their time well in order to be successful, and therefore value efficiency in learning (“I can read the pages in the book in 1/3 of the time and probably understand twice as well. So, I did a little calculation there and realized that it was better to be at home.“). One comment on communting, that the authors find as an important time-saving factor in students’ consideration, but say that it doesn’t seem like such a big deal from an outside perspective: I can very much relate to that as a factor, because commuting doesn’t just mean time on public transport, but also having a shower, getting dressed, packing a bag, whereas the alternative is waking up and opening a laptop to work from my bed or the sofa. So I definitely see a substantial amount of time (and energy! I hate crowded public transport!) saved on days when I work from home! Anyway. Students also value staying “in phase” with the scheduled teaching.
• external course context factors
  • access to online learning resources: This can be recordings of the lecture by the same lecturer (students especially appreciate that they can pause it to take notes) or other materials online materials by other creators, including some that they find through search engines and not in an organised format or through recommendation. In courses where it is difficult to find materials online, attendance is then more tempting again.
  • competing time commitments: Some students report prioritizing work, time with family, training, etc. over class attendance, and some mention conflicting schedules with other courses, or difficulties commuting.
• campus environment
  • social influences on attendance: Here, some students feel that attending teaching is a nice way to fulfill their social needs, whereas others experience social overload and just want to learn and not interact with other people, whereas even others feel like they only want to attend when they are with friends there to act as safety net (“I just feel like it’s very bright and very noisy and not nice to be there. And if you go there with other people sure, but if you go there alone, I have often been made to feel stupid by the teachers and then I get stressed when people ask really specific and well thought out questions that I don’t even understand, and then I feel bad from the external influence kind of“)
  • experience of the teaching environment: this is described in three main areas: how advanced and in-depth the explanations were (they need to be not too easy but also not to hard, some students also like explanations from other students), whether the speed of the lecture matched their preferences, and if the teacher behaved in the way they expected them to behave
• self-reflection on learning strategies: Students reflect often on their learning experiences in order to plan, for example, the next week; and weigh different learning options against each other (using the criteria described above)

What I find a really important result of this study is that students approach attendance and absence mostly very strategically. Students that initially attend (almost) everything sometimes reach a “breaking point”, where they reevaluate their learning strategies, triggered for example when they are forced to learn from videos due to illness (and apparently for as little as 3 days!), and then decide that this new strategy is more efficient.

Another really interesting point is that students have very different understandings of what “teaching” means: It can mean only the lecture, or also include all kinds of learning activities. But that also means that “attending teaching” is maybe interpreted differently by students and teachers, where teachers typically mean “do I see students in person in my classroom” (my example quote for emphasis, not from the report), whereas some students might also mean that they watched recorded videos or read course materials. So estimated attendance of “teaching” is not as well defined as one might hope. Similarly, “learning” for many students likely means “passing the exam”, not “learning so you can build on it in the future” (again, my made-up quote).

This leads to four recommendations for teachers:

1. Focus on student meta-cognition and study techniques
2. Communicate the purpose of teaching activities and how you think they work to achieve the goal better than alternatives
3. Improve the feedback questions in order to understand what students actually mean when they respond to questions about attendance of teaching
4. Make sure learning goals, assessment, and learning activities are aligned

The authors conclude with an important message: “institutions should focus less on increasing [student] attendance and more on optimising learning activities to align with modern student behaviours.”

Samuelsson, J., Regnér, S., Nilsson, S., and Bolander Laksov, K. (2025) “Students’ Reasons for Absence in First-cycle Engineering Education – an Interview Study” https://www.lth.se/fileadmin/cee/genombrottet/web_version_rapport_nr_4.pdf