2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

(Research Paper) Class attendance is one factor contributing to students’ success in undergraduate classes. Course instructors use attendance policies as classroom management tools to encourage students’ engagement and outline the procedure for absenteeism. They range from strict policies that penalize absent students to lax policies where attendance is encouraged but not enforced. However, these extremes are not suitable for every classroom situation, especially hands-on design and team-based engineering classes. At the same time, providing students with more flexibility often comes at a cost for faculty members and instructional teams who have to make decisions about missed classes and assignments. Understanding how flexible attendance policies affect students’ attendance behaviors and perceptions, and impact instructors’ workload is crucial for designing equitable classroom/attendance policies. This paper presents the impact of an innovative attendance policy on students’ attendance behavior and perceptions of autonomy in a third-year biomedical engineering class. We hope to address the following research questions: (1) Did students perceive the new attendance policy as equitable, why or why not? (2) Did students perceive the new attendance policy as agency-supporting, why or why not? We interviewed two students enrolled in a biomedical engineering seminar course to understand their perceptions of and experience with the innovative attendance policy. We found that students perceived the policy as relatively equitable and supported their agency. These results contribute to efforts to promote equitable engineering classroom cultures that are scalable and manageable for the course instructors.