Lecture attendance improves success in medical physiology

Abstract

The educators have underlined the importance of lecture attendance for decades. Nowadays, students have ample online educational sources, which began a debate on the necessity of in-class lectures. In the present study, we investigated the influence of lecture attendance on the exam success. To this aim, we adopted a novel approach and matched second-year medicine students' answers in three interim exams with the lectures related to those questions. Thereby, we were able to evaluate if attending lectures increases the chance of giving a correct answer to the exam question generated from the attended lecture. Furthermore, we examined students who had never taken the course before (first-time takers) and students who had failed and repeated the course (repeat takers) separately, since repeat takers may have attended a lecture previously. We found that first-time takers attended more lectures and gained higher total scores than repeat takers. Lecture-matched correct answers were significantly higher for attended lectures than for skipped lectures in all interim exams. Moreover, the correlation analyses revealed that the number of correct answers increases by lecture attendance in both first-time and repeat takers. These results indicate that in-class lectures still should be considered as an essential part of the medical physiology education, even in the internet era.

A Systematic Review of the Relationship Between Lecture Attendance and Academic Outcomes for Students Studying the Human Biosciences

“…Three studies showed moderate associations ( (Hamdi, 2006;Jaykaran et al, 2011;Stegers-Jager et al, 2012), one study showed moderate to weak associations (Al Khaja et al, 2019) and one study showed a weak association between lecture attendance and academic outcomes (Demir et al, 2012). In addition, one of the studies using correlation analysis was able to show that the students had better outcomes for the lectures they attended than for the ones they skipped, and that this was true for both the first-time and repeat takers (Demir et al, 2017).…”

No apparent association between lecture attendance or accessing lecture recordings and academic outcomes in a medical laboratory science course

“…In the 2010 meta-analysis, the positive relationship between lecture attendance and academic performance was also observed for the subgroup of 11 studies of students studying science [2]. The individual studies for students of the biological sciences included in the metaanalysis and subsequent studies of these students have mostly shown a positive association between lecture attendance and academic outcomes [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], but some have not [22,23].…”

Does Dental Students' Attendance in Classroom Lectures Depend on the Mode of Attendance Tracking?

“…Mandating students' attendance in classrooms has been, and continues to be a disputable issue, particularly for dental schools. Available literature on students' attendance patterns is scarce and there is no agreement between scientists about the potential impact, if any, on the academic performance of students (Alghamdi et al, 2016;Credé et al, 2010;Demir et al, 2017). А significant number of studies supported inclass attendance and demonstrated its importance for academic success.…”