Grading participation in college courses: Instructor attitudes and practices

An exploratory study was launched to redress a gap in the literature that is expressed as an assumption that “most” college instructors grade participation in undergraduate courses. A sample of 521 instructors at a large, northeastern public university was surveyed to assess their attitudes and practices in grading participation in undergraduate courses of 50 students or less. A survey instrument was developed for the purpose of this study and subjected to principal components analysis, and this instrument yielded 7 subscales of acceptable reliability (Cronbach's alpha ≥ .70). Results suggest that the majority of instructors across disciplines incorporate a “participation” factor into students' final course grades. A discriminant function analysis was performed to generate a function which may be used to predict the likelihood that an instructor will grade participation based upon his/her beliefs and attitudes, and the proposed model was found to be discriminating (λ(3) = .70, N = 258, p < .001) with a moderate effect size. Implications and next steps are discussed