MAILING LISTS

My teams keep track of attendance using Larry's method.  I keep a mental note, as my classes are small enough (25-60) that I know who's who after a couple of weeks.  In terms of impact on the grade, I also figure that teams punish chronic absenteeism in peer evaluations and students who are absent usually don't do as well on individual assignments, so two forms of punishment.

I harass my students to return evaluations to me until I get them.  I posted the evaluation form on Blackboard this year and told them to email it to me.  Then I just made a folder in my mail for them.  I feel like I got better feedback as students seem more inclined to type comments than to hand write comments.  I typically have quite a few students who will only rate but not give comments, even though I express the value of the comments, but there were fewer this year with the electronic evaluations.

Molly Espey

-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jennifer Imazeki
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 10:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Attendance

Dianne and Larry's comments made me remember that I was going to ask you all a question about attendance - do most of you require attendance? How do you incorporate it into the grade? I'm curious because I do not technically keep track of attendance (I say 'technically' because I use clickers and if someone is absent, they do lose clicker points). I figured that if someone is absent a lot, their teammates would account for that in their evaluations. But I have a couple teams that I think are suffering from chronic absences, and attendance has actually not been as high as I expected. Other than the individual clicker points, students have no specific graded incentive to attend (since I do not grade the majority of the team applications) but I'm wondering if I should change that. I usually don't like to make attendance 'mandatory' but than again, in my past courses, a student being absent only hurt him/herself, not anyone else...

Along similar lines, how do people handle absences on the day of evaluations? I did mid-semester evaluations yesterday and there were a lot of students absent. Other than the fact that they will not contribute to the evaluation of their teammates (and my guess is that their teammates were less generous to those who were not physically there), does anyone penalize students in some way for missing those evaluations?

thanks,
Jennifer
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Jennifer Imazeki
Department of Economics
San Diego State University
homepage: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~jimazeki/
Economics for Teachers blog: http://economicsforteachers.blogspot.com