Attendance Guide

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Attendance matters. Researchers continue to draw positive connections between learners’ regular attendance and participation and their academic performance. However, during the first two years of college, as undergraduate learners learn to juggle their academic and extracurricular obligations, time management and prioritization of tasks can become challenging. The benefits of regular attendance may not be obvious to new students, especially because today’s fiercely digital culture doesn’t often require being physically or mentally present and engaged. Maintaining a record of attendance and participation can be a means to support your learners to strengthen their executive functioning as independent adults. In this guide, we explore ways to discuss the importance of and expectations about attendance before offering some suggestions about how to track attendance in Canvas.

Discussing Attendance with Your Learners

You can motivate learners to maximize their attendance by a combination of the following: 

  • Explain the importance of real-time presence and what strong attendance and participation looks like (i.e., being more than a seat warmer, policy for using devices during class, active participation) at the first class meeting Communicating expectations transparently is part of “goal setting,” which enables learners to understand the value of their attendance and participation (McClelland and Case, 2023; Lam, 2023).
  • Include your department’s attendance and participation policy in your syllabus, making reference to it throughout the term. This might include reference to Dartmouth’s campus-wide in-person learning policy. Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center includes several examples for attendance and participation policies. 
  • Address attendance and performance concerns in 1:1 meetings with the learner to discover why they may be struggling with attendance and participation, and strategize for improvements (Duotl, 2024; Fetter, 2023). 
  • Within Canvas, utilize intelligent agents to send automated messages checking on learners and reminding them to log in and complete activities. 
  • Within Canvas, log attendance weekly and encourage learners to review their activity and attend office hours or seek support from an appropriate tutoring department to develop successful attendance and participation habits. 

Using Canvas to Track Attendance

Canvas is a useful tool when tracking attendance, especially as we strive to display it as transparently for students as possible. By utilizing Canvas, you can maintain an ongoing record of learners’ attendance in your various course activities. Similarly, learners maintain ongoing access to their Canvas attendance record, enabling them to log in and visualize their progress at any moment.

We recommend using the Assignments tool to create an Assignment Group for attendance rather than using the Attendance (Roll Call) tool on Canvas. Creating an “Attendance” Group under the Assignments tab will keep all of your attendance data in one place, allowing you to set up individual Assignments within the group to reflect your course’s attendance activities, including class participation, labs, and X-hours. 

Here is how to do it:

  1. After logging into your Canvas course site, click on the ‘Assignments’ tab on the left-side navigation bar.
Screenshot of the left-side navigation bar of a Canvas course site with the location of the Assignments tab being indicated.
  1. On the Assignments tab, click on the ‘+Group’ button to add an Assignment Group.
Screenshot of the Assignments tab on a Canvas course site with the location of the +Group button being indicated.
  1. When the ‘Add Assignment Group’ window appears, name the group to make it identifiable to both learners and yourself. In the example below, the Group Name will be “Attendance”. When you’re done, click on the ‘Save’ button.
Screenshot of the Add Assignment Group window, where Group Name has the word Attendance typed out as an example.
  1. The new “Attendance” Assignment Group will be immediately visible on your Assignments page. Within that group, click on the ‘+’ button to set up individual Assignments that reflect your course’s attendance activities.
Screenshot of the Attendance group on the Assignments tab of a Canvas course site with the location of the + button being indicated.
  1. When the ‘Add Assignment to (Group Name)’ window appears, select the Type of Assignment that you would like for it to be. We recommend using the ‘Not Graded’ option to remind learners that attendance is being tracked as a support for their class engagement rather than for a grade. Then, name the Assignment and determine a ‘Due Date’ for its tracking completion. Finally, you can determine whether the assignment will be worth a specific number of points – since Attendance is not graded in our example, we are setting the ‘Points’ to zero. When you’re done, click on the ‘Save & Publish’ button. 
Screenshot of the Add Assignment to (Group Name) window.
  1. Repeat steps 4 and 5 to add as many Assignments as you need to your Assignment Group!

Further Support

If you would like to discuss opportunities to promote attendance in your courses, or support on setting up Canvas to meet your attendance tracking needs, we invite you to book a consultation with us!

Further Reading