Writing Assignment:
In response to the Reading Assignment, compose an essay using Microsoft Word on your own computer. There are three required sections and each should be labeled:

1. Summary(less than 250 words): Write a one paragraph summary of the passage. A summary describes the main points of a text but uses fewer words. A summary does not contain your opinion.
2. Essay(1.5-2 pages): Write a multi‐paragraph essay responding to the arguments in the assigned passage; agree, disagree, or modify the author’s arguments. Use examples from the passage and your own experiences to develop and support your points, ideas, and/or opinions. You should spend most of your time on this portion of the English Placement essay.
3. Reflection: Reread your essay. Write a paragraph in which you explain what you did well in your essay and what you think are your weaknesses.

Your writing will be evaluated based on your ability to:
1. Understand the reading and present the main ideas in the summary.
2. Express your ideas clearly in the summary, in the essay, and in the reflection.
3. Support your ideas in the essay with specific examples and details.
4. Use Standard English.
Reading Assignment:

“Just Showing Up: Educators Focus on Attendance to Help Students Succeed” by Rae Tusher Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 June 2011.

The age‐old practice of taking attendance is gaining new emphasis in some college classrooms, with administrators and faculty viewing stronger incentives for showing up as a way to further their goals of improving retention and increasing graduation rates.

Administrators in the California State University system, for example, have asked professors to consider taking attendance or making it mandatory, if they do not already, as one part of an effort to raise the proportion of students who graduate within four years. At Northern Arizona University, officials are trying to better track attendance by using technology, including electronic sensors and clickers, to record who does and does not show up for class. One goal is to improve retention among freshmen.

Doing more to get students into classrooms helps foster stronger personal connections between students and their campuses, says Ken O’Donnell, associate dean of academic programs and policy in the Cal State system. That connection is particularly important for helping more minority students succeed, he says.

Emphasizing attendance, Mr. O’Donnell says, is “a very simple way to signal that your education is important.”
Several professors on Cal State’s East Bay campus have made just showing up a significant portion of their students’ grades.

In one first‐year general‐studies course, 40 percent of each student’s grade is based on attendance. And if he or she misses more than three sessions, the student gets an automatic F. In an introductory communications course, whether or not a person is in class will determine up to 15 percent of his or her grade.

The professors who teach those courses say using grades as incentives to attend class helps first‐year students develop good habits as they adjust to college.

Julie Stein, a lecturer in general studies and communications courses, along with other colleagues from East Bay, suggested creating an attendance policy to help with a campuswide effort to help first‐year students succeed academically.

“This is about setting peer norms,” says Ms. Stein, who also teaches at Las Positas College (where, in her courses, attendance counts for 20 percent of students’ grades). She says she draws her philosophy from what she saw in her former job in corporate training and development: “If you measure it, it gets done.”

Predictor of Achievement
The relationship between attendance and grades was being formally explored as early as 1927, according to a paper published last June in the Review of Educational Research by three researchers at the State University of New York at Albany.

In their paper, titled “Class Attendance in College: A Meta‐Analytic Review of the Relationship of Class Attendance With Grades and Student Characteristics,” Marcus Credé, Sylvia G. Roch, and Urszula M. Kieszczynka found that showing up for class was a stronger predictor of high marks in college than were many other commonly used predictors, including study habits, study skills, high‐school grade‐point averages, and scores on the SAT and other standardized tests.

Repeated exposure to class materials clearly has a positive effect on students’ grades, says Mr. Credé, an assistant professor of psychology. One of the greatest benefits students may receive when they come to class, he says, is that they can pick up on the subtle hints professors drop about what may be the most important material to know.

However, the authors couldn’t say what sort of student is statistically more likely to attend college classes. Having good high‐school grades and standardized‐test scores did not seem to make a person significantly more likely than his or her peers to attend class. Age, too, wasn’t found to be a factor in predicting attendance. Only gender showed a small relationship, with women tending to go to class more than men.

“Our understanding of who comes to class and who doesn’t is very incomplete right now,” Mr. Credé says.
Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota‐Twin Cities, who has studied the effects of attendance in science courses, says it can matter a lot for students whose academic ability is in the middle.
“The best students in the class are going to succeed despite me, another group doesn’t have a chance, and for the middle group of students nothing is more important than effort,” he says.
There is a “remarkably strong correlation,” he says, between the “raw effort” of showing up to class and grading and learning.
Despite the findings of his own work, Mr. Moore does not have an attendance requirement.
“I would think that’s insulting” to students, he says. He does, however, explain the correlation between attendance and higher grades on the first day of classes.
Mr. Credé agrees that mandatory attendance at the college level is the wrong approach. “Philosophically, I have something against forcing adults to do something they should do,” he says. “It’s more appropriate to encourage students to come to class in some way.”
His analysis of research on attendance data has found only a “small positive impact” of mandatory attendance policies on grades. And, like many of the researchers who have studied the relationship between attendance and grades, Mr. Credé does not penalize students for being absent. Instead he attempts to keep students engaged in his classroom by mixing discussions and hands‐on activities with his lectures.

Active Engagement
Some advocates of mandatory attendance policies acknowledge that requiring students to show up will have little effect if professors do not also use students’ time wisely.

Michelle Miller, an associate professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University, tries to make sure students are not just in class but also actively engaged. In a broader effort by the university to improve retention rates and learning among freshmen, she and the other professors who teach Psychology 101 agreed last fall to make attendance and classroom participation worth about 10 percent of their students’ grades.

“One of the strongest predictors of retention is classroom performance,” Ms. Miller says. And one of the best ways to foster better classroom performance, she adds, is to have attendance and participation recorded and counted as part of the grade.

Ms. Miller’s Psychology 101 students use handheld clickers to check in at various points and answer questions based on the class discussion. “It holds them accountable and keeps them engaged,” she says. Those responses, along with being present in class, are classified as participation for the students’ grades.

Professors and administrators across the university have increased their focus on attendance policies as part of the campaign to improve first‐year experiences. Last year Northern Arizona began to track attendance in some classes by using electronic sensors to record student‐ identification cards as the students entered classrooms. The effort faced opposition from many students, who argued it violated their privacy. Because of technical issues, the project has been delayed, with only two classrooms fitted with the sensors so far.

Another new technology is affecting some students’ views on in‐person learning. The growth of online course‐management systems has meant that some students turn to them as an alternative to attending class. If students can get the same information online that they can in class, they may be right in not attending, says Ms. Miller, who serves on a committee that is investigating how course design can improve retention.

Coming to class, she says, must be encouraged by creating a classroom environment that gives students an incentive to attend. That can be as simple as presenting new information or expanding on old information in a new way.

Some students, however, believe that professors should make everything that they do in class available online, so that being present in person is essentially optional.

“I got some rude e‐mails from students from who thought online material should be mandatory,” says Mr. Credé.

And pleasing students has become a greater concern of many professors, he notes, a reality that complicates efforts to mandate attendance. With “the emphasis on student evaluations, professors have shied away from hard tests and attendance policies,” he says.

It is important for professors to teach in a way that engages students and gives them incentives to show up for class, Mr. Credé says, but doing too much to try to please students risks watering down courses.

“We went to some fairly boring classes, and we were frustrated,” he says of his own experience in college. But now there is “too much of an expectation to be entertained.”

And students, he adds, “often are surprised that they don’t do well when they don’t come