
Why is it that even though most people agree (and most university policies state) that active student engagement is desirable, there are still large lecture theatres being built? Loughlin (2025) explores the “theory of action”, which distinguishes between what people or organisations say they do (for example in mission statements or policies; “espoused theory”) and […]

Teaching in Higher Ed with host Bonni Stachowiak is really one of my top 3 all time favorite podcasts. Today, I listened to her talking with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer in an episode on “rethinking student attendance policies for deeper engagement and learning“, and they talk about it in a way that really resonated […]

Student attendance has been a hot topic for a while now. In this study, an impressive 101 interviews with students from one first-year course on what teacher behaviours influence their attendance are analysed. They find that structured guidance, promoting active participation, acknowledging students’ feelings, and teaching performance are the most important categories.

Samuelsson et al. (2025) recently investigated students’ reasons for absence, and it turns out that at least our first-year students at LTH are very strategic about attendance vs learning in other ways elsewhere. But even though students have proven that they can learn well on their own, for social reasons it is still nice for […]

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 […]