Strategies for Supporting Lecture Attendance: Insights from Art History and Physics
The following case studies illustrate two contrasting but complementary approaches that schools have taken to encourage lecture attendance. The Schools of Art History and Physics have each implemented distinctive, evidence‑based strategies to encourage lecture attendance and engagement, especially in sub honours modules. Art History has focused on integrating lecture content directly into assessments and tutorial activities, making attendance a natural prerequisite for academic success. Physics took a more interactive approach, using audience-response technology to make lectures engaging and participatory, while introducing a small mark for engagement to incentivise attendance. Together, these examples demonstrate how thoughtful assessment design, clear pedagogical alignment and active learning strategies can motivate students to attend and engage in lectures.
The School of Art History has maintained good lecture attendance through a combination of assessment design and pedagogical alignment.
Participation Grading:
Most modules allocate 10% of the final grade to participation. Although this primarily evaluates tutorial engagement and class presentations, it establishes a broader framework of accountability that encourages consistent attendance and preparation. Students are expected to arrive ready to discuss the assigned readings, respond to that week’s presentation, and contribute to group discussion.
Participation also includes a weekly post on the tutorial group’s Teams space. In Week 1, students are added to the Team corresponding to their tutorial. After each week’s lectures, students select one work of art or architecture discussed in lectures, accompanied by a brief (3–5 sentence) explanation of its significance. This might relate to a central theme from the lectures or readings, or highlight an artistic form or technique covered that week. Students must avoid duplication—if a peer has already posted their chosen work, they must either select a different object or provide a distinct perspective on the same one. This exercise has also proved valuable to facilitate tutorial discussion, as students can prepare their contributions ahead of class.
Integration of Lectures, Tutorials and Assessment:
Tutorial discussions are closely linked to lecture content and assigned readings, creating a strong alignment that makes lecture attendance essential for meaningful participation. In addition, the final assessment is summative: the content and questions of the take‑home paper, finalised collaboratively by the lecturers in each team-taught course, are closely tied to the material covered in lectures, further reinforcing the importance of attending and engaging with lecture-based teaching.
Authors: Dr Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri and Dr Emily Savage
School of Physics
The use of audience-response systems, such as Vevox, has been a long-standing feature of our pre-honours physics curriculum. These “clicker” questions were designed to explore student’s conceptual understanding and facilitate peer discussion during lectures. Active engagement during lectures also allows lecturers to gauge classroom comprehension in real time. Historically, participation rates were high, and the interactivity during lectures was always highly praised by the student body.
Following the return to in-person teaching post-pandemic, we observed a significant decline in both lecture attendance and active participation. In many sessions, only half of those attending engaged with the response units. This period of lower engagement coincided with a noticeable dip in overall module attainment.
For the 2024-25 session we decided to include Vevox questions in all Physics 1A lectures to make these teaching sessions more interactive and better for education. At the same time, we introduced a 5% module mark for active engagement with Vevox questions. Crucially, marks were awarded for engagement rather than accuracy, maintaining a low-stakes environment focused on thinking about content and improving learning during lectures. We provided clearer communication regarding the pedagogical aims of why active participation is vital in learning and to promote this further we integrated activities specifically designed to develop relevant academic skills in both lectures and tutorials. These interventions resulted in a marked increase in lecture attendance (typically 85 – 90% throughout the semester), higher levels of lecture interaction, and an improvement in overall module results. Essentially, the lecture theatre became full of first-year students enthusiastically taking about physics with each other.
Academic alerts were issued to the relatively small number of students with low engagement with the Vevox lecture questions. We followed up with these students and offered early support where needed.
Due to this success, we have expanded the use of Vevox questions to other pre-honours physics modules, and are trialling this in select core honours levels modules. We continue to observe positive trends in student engagement in these other modules. Notably, these benefits appear to extend even to lectures where engagement marks are not included in the final module grade.
Authors: Dr Lucy Hadfield and Dr Bruce Sinclair