I've used TBL for a few years now and only last semester did I encounter an attendance problem. In all other semesters typically 1 or 2 were missing from my 30-40 person classes (junior-senior level ones) every day. But last semester, I had a day or two where 5 to maybe 10 were gone and that then continued for the rest of the semester. I seemed powerless to do anything other than saying "attendance matters." In short, I was stumped on what to do. This semester I just the following. We had our second class meeting today and 3 of 33 were gone (one each from 3 of 6 teams in the class). I e-mailed each missing student and asked them to explain to their teammates why they were gone. I included e-mail addresses and asked to be cc'ed. I figure that soon half the teams will know that attendance matters. In short, I'm trying to set the right norms. - Bill P.S. If other TBL users typically have good attendance like I usually do, I wonder if that alone might have affected class evals? I'm thinking that in most classes, poorer students aren't in class and they might give the bad evals. It is pretty easy to make this claim to administrator as most evals include the percent of the class in attendance. P.P.S. On how lecture doesn't work very well, I really like http://tonydude.us/sdsu_per/articles/Transforming%20Physics%20Education%20-%20Physics%20Today%20November%202005.pdf (search for "violin"). Basically, after a non-trivial or counterintuitive fact is presented in lecture, hardly anyone remembered it 15 minutes later! It might be worth noting that the first author is a huge name in physics education research; he's both a Nobel Laureate (2001) and U.S. Professor of the Year (2004). He's now Deputy Science Adviser to the President (for science education). His "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf made me really think about my teaching and indirectly got me into TBL. He's currently on leave from UBC, where he normally heads the the "Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/ . -- Bill Goffe Department of Economics SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall Oswego, NY 13126 315-312-3444(v), 315-312-5444(f) [log in to unmask] http://cook.rfe.org