As a teacher, you might sometimes realize with regret, that students stay away from lectures and working groups. Despite all your energy to provide relevant and interesting meetings. While it is important for study success and student well-being that students do attend.
Elliott McGroarty and Robertson (2023) investigated whether a so-called Volitional Help Sheet (VHS) (a goal intention exercise), could increase online college attendance. Using this document, students encourage themselves to keep going to college by thinking about what they can do when they are tempted to skip lectures. This method offers a practical application of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1985). By helping students clarify their goals and identify possible obstacles to achieving that goal, the goal intention questionnaire increases control over their behaviour and reinforces their intention to attend. The VHS is relatively easy to create and takes little time to integrate into your teaching. So that can be very appealing for teachers to use.
How does it work?
The VHS consists of a list of 20 situations that reflect reasons students often give for missing lectures. First, a student selects a situation they think would most tempt them to miss a lecture. This is presented to the student as an IF statement. For example:
"IF I am tempted to miss a lecture because a deadline is approaching..."
The student then selects one of 24 possible THEN statements that describes a targeted response to neutralise the IF statement. For example:
“...THEN I will remind myself that attending lectures will help me get a higher grade.”
Together, the selection forms a single IF-THEN statement (i.e. the implementation intention). For a successful outcome of the intervention, it is necessary to repeat the task three more times over the duration of a course, with students also being shown their previous IF-THEN statements again and reflecting on them.
What is the result?
The research shows that a VHS works to increase attendance at online lectures. But this is relative; it is not a miracle cure. For example, the VHS does not ensure fully sustained attendance. But, compared to the control group in which only 5 percent of students still attended the final lecture, the VHS group showed that 13 percent still attended the final meetings. In addition, of course, the study has its limitations: the study involved online lectures and the researchers do not relate it to course outcomes.
How to apply this?
The study showed that a simple intervention can already help improve students' college attendance.
- Want to try out the intervention yourself? Then get started with the VHS. We made this online form based on appendix A and B of the study.
- Looking for support in implementing this? If so, please contact us at onderwijswerkplaats@vu.nl
- Want to research the intervention yourself? Then request, for example Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).