Currently reading Samuelsson et al. (2026): “Why students skip class: exploring absenteeism in first-year engineering education”

This is a question that many teachers ponder, and here we have an answer. In a nutshell: students are often very strategic in their decision to (not) attend!

Samuelsson et al. (2026) conducted focus group interviews with first year students here at LTH. I first wrote about this study in a lot more detail when it was “only” a report, but here are my main take-aways:

Students come to our classes with experiences of how learning has worked so far in their educational careers, and expectations of what it will be like at LTH. They are used to attending everything, but soon choose to attend mostly those sessions that seem to benefit their learning, and since they are not used to reflecting on their learning or study techniques or experiment to find optimal ones, benefit to learning is measured in time efficiency. So if good materials for a topic are available (whether provided by the teacher or just on the internet), they are an attractive alternative to attending. Time efficiency is important to students because of other activities competing for their time, for example working, volunteering, exercising, or mental health care, and sleep schedules are often prioritised over class schedules. Teaching is perceived as worth attending if the teachers are approachable and provide a lot of examples at the right level of difficulty, and the teaching pace matches individual needs. But it is also important to students that the social environment and relationships with their peers matches their expectations and preferences. Ultimately, students make strategic decisions about the costs and benefits of attendance, and non-attendance does not mean that students do not want to learn or do not engage.

What that means for teaching is that we need to be aware how students make decisions about attendance, reconsider what kind of engagement we want to see and encourage and why, and communicate how we think learning happens and why we think presence is important for learning (if that’s what we think).

Really important study, great to see it published!

Samuelsson, J., Regnér, S., Nilsson, S., & Bolander Laksov, K. (2026). Why students skip class: exploring absenteeism in first-year engineering education. European Journal of Engineering Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2026.2734199