What are the chances? Tuition attendance, completion and attainment correlations.

As meetings to plan tuition delivery for the next academic year start to populate my diary, I find myself revisiting the report from a longitudinal scholarship project on attendance, attainment and completion I and several colleagues within the English and Creative Writing department at The Open University (OU) completed last March. Although the project focused very specifically on our current undergraduate English Literature students, some of the findings are likely to be transferable, perhaps even beyond our online, distance learning model. This seemed an opportune moment to share what we learned not just because others may be similarly making tuition plans for the year ahead, but also because some might wish to implement one of the practical project recommendations within what remains of the current academic year.

Context and initial activities

The project was initially set up to interrogate the effectiveness of tuition strategy changes introduced in October 2019 and leading, on the one hand, to a greater emphasis on online tutor-group teaching and, on the other, to the piloting of day-long, level-wide (rather than module-specific) face-to-face events. The pilot was eventually a much smaller one than anticipated as tuition moved wholly online at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic – and to consider what impact this change in tuition delivery might have on attendance, attainment, and completion patterns, the project was extended to include quantitative data for a total of 5 academic years (from 2017/2018 to 2021/2022).

As originally planned, qualitative data was only gathered during the 2019/2020 academic year via questionnaires asking students about their experience of – in particular – the two new tuition activities offered that year. With the cancellation of all face-to-face teaching halfway through the academic year, the questionnaires perhaps unsurprisingly provided extremely limited insight into the appeal and effectiveness of non-module-specific teaching. The availability of regular seminar-style sessions led by students’ allocated tutor, however, received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Some lessons from the quantitative data deep dive

Before 2020, the balance of undergraduate English Literature tuition at the OU rested firmly on face-to-face teaching and proposals to expand the online tuition offer (and consequently reduce the number of face-to-face events) were understandably met with a certain degree of trepidation. In this context, therefore, it was refreshing and reassuring to find that moving from mostly-face-to-face to wholly-online tuition across the period covered by the project had not had a detrimental impact on the percentage of registered students attending at least one live event. On average, in fact, attendance levels increased in the two years of online-only tuition, with a greater percentage of registered undergraduate English Literature students (65%-66% v. 56%-61% previously) attending live events and doing so more frequently. Significantly, despite existing misgivings about the effectiveness of online tuition (some of them captured in students’ answers to the questionnaire, where they commented on the limited opportunities for interactivity online), module completion levels were broadly comparable throughout. The percentage of students passing a module having attended tuition events remained consistently higher than the proportion of students passing without having attended tuition events, too. And, actually, in the final two years covered by the project, a greater majority of students who were awarded Pass 1 or 2 module results had attended live teaching events (respectively 83%-85% v. 72%-79% and 77%-78% v. 56%-75%).

Our data analysis deep-dive also surfaced some other interesting nuances. For example, exploring how students chose to attend tuition events while face-to-face and online activities coexisted revealed a steady increase in online attendance, but not necessarily at the expense of engagement in face-to-face activities. This is because there was also a growing number of students attending tutorials on the same topic multiple times and in different formats – and they tended to be more likely to complete and receive high grades. Additionally, the data for the student group attending exclusively face-to-face events suggested that this format might have been more attractive for less academically confident students or those unsure or sceptical about online tuition. Students exclusively attending face-to-face events were statistically more likely to not complete their module or to achieve Pass 3 or 4 module results than students attending either online only or a mixture of face-to-face and online events.

Moreover, while interrogating attendance data by event type, we were pleased to discover that over 80% of students actively engaged in live teaching and learning opportunities participated in tutor-group events – and even more delighted to note that, for a not insignificant 12% of all attending students, tutor-group events were their only engagement in live tutorials. Besides meeting a need for a subsection of our student body, we found some evidence that the introduction of tutor-group events also had the desired effect of improving retention. In particular, since the introduction of the tutor-group events, one of our stage 3 (Level 6) modules retained more students year-on-year and another had noticeably higher retention in its final stages.

Irrespective of the format of tuition delivery in use or the combination of event types, however, the data we examined showed a broadly consistent and marked decline in attendance levels from the start of the second half of the academic year (i.e. February). While attendance generally picked up at the very end of a module, it remained much lower than at the start - with the occasional exception of attendance rising sharply at the end for stage 3 (Level 6) modules. Indeed, regularly, about a fifth of all undergraduate English Literature students participating in tuition events attended a single one – typically at the very start of the academic year – and around 40% of students in this group did not complete their module.

A practical recommendation

Given the seeming correlation between attendance, completion and attainment, following up on non- or low attendance in those contexts, such as the one at the OU, where attendance is not compulsory seems highly desirable. Operationalising personalised contact about this in these settings is likely to prove difficult, but module-wide communications encouraging all students to attend forthcoming events when the momentum of the first couple of months in a presentation is fading should be relatively easy to organise. Additionally or alternatively, a manageable and discreet way of promoting attendance regularly might be to take up real-time opportunities to remind students of the tuition support available to them, for instance by encouraging all tutors to use a ‘forthcoming events’ slide/handout – prepared by the module manager – at the end of any standard live sessions.   

Of course, further qualitative scholarship work exploring students’ attendance preferences, their motivations for attending, or barriers to attendance and how to overcome them would greatly help our future tuition planning efforts.

For further details please contact:

Encarna Trinidad, Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in English