Patrick Bijsmans and Arjan Schakel have just published the first results of their attendance research in ‘Higher Education’, one of the leading peer-reviewed international journals in higher education studies. In this open access article, Patrick and Arjan look into the impact of attendance on first-year study success in the BA ES. They find that attendance matters for several measures of study success, also for the most engaged students.
Abstract
The literature on first-year study success has identified a host of factors that may affect a student’s chances of succeeding, ranging from personal circumstances to educational environment. One of the factors that often emerges in this context is (non-)attendance of classes, lectures and tutorials. Intuitively, one would expect this to be all the more important in programmes that employ a student-centred and interactive approach to learning, such as problem-based learning. Interestingly, there is little dedicated research that looks into the importance of (non-)attendance in such a learning environment. This article addresses this gap in the literature by looking at the effect of (non-)attendance on the study success of three cohorts of Maastricht University’s Bachelor in European Studies (annual intake of 325–350 students). Controlling for a range of factors, we find that attendance matters for several measures of study success and also for the committed and participating student.