2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Paper Category: Empirical Research, Length: Full Paper

Most instructors who require attendance do so with the goal of improving student learning. However, attendance does not guarantee engagement. Although attendance has been found to be positively correlated with academic performance, studies of attendance suggest a complex relationship among student motivation, attendance, and learning outcomes. Providing incentives for attendance without considering student perspectives and psychological needs may indeed have counterproductive effects on student motivation. Self-determination theory posits that individuals are more likely to be intrinsically motivated when psychological needs are met, specifically needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This suggests that class sessions can be designed to encourage attendance by supporting these psychological needs, and presumably that is preferable to extrinsic reinforcement through punishing lack of attendance with grade penalties, or even positively reinforcing attendance with grade-based rewards.

While there are many prior studies of attendance and motivation in engineering courses, there is a relative lack of studies comparing student motivation with a variety of instructional methods (e.g., different modes of active learning), especially in engineering courses. The purpose of this study is to compare student motivations to attend two different types of class session in a digital systems course: lecture sessions that are primarily instructor-led with active learning in the form of guided problem solving, versus laboratory (lab) sessions that are primarily hands-on and student-led with instructors and teaching assistants available to answer questions. Attendance is not required or graded for lecture or lab sessions, both sessions cover similar class material each week, and most students are able to complete lab work outside of the classroom. Therefore, our goals in the current work are: to identify reasons that students choose to attend class sessions in the absence of attendance requirements, to determine whether and how these reasons differ for lecture versus lab, and to analyze how these reasons may change over time. Additionally, we investigate whether students prefer the combination of lecture and lab sessions, versus only lecture or only lab.

This paper discusses the results of two surveys conducted on the same population of students, with the first survey near the midpoint of the semester and the second survey near the semester end. In each survey students were asked to describe what motivates them to attend lecture and lab sessions, and to share their preferences for lecture, lab, or both. Responses to open-ended questions were analyzed using inductive content analysis to determine whether student motivations differ based on instructional methods, and whether motivations change over the course of the semester.

Keywords: Motivation, Instructional methods, Self-determination theory, Content analysis