Notes from the Vice Provost: Letter to Students About Attendance Study

On November 12th, this email was sent by Peter Bol, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, to all of the students in courses where attendance patterns are analyzed as part of a study.

Under the auspices of my office, a research study on attendance patterns took place in the spring of 2014.

The methods of the study involved photographs of lecture halls and a computer algorithm to differentiate filled from empty seats with no identification of any individual student, and subsequent destruction of the underlying images. The researchers involved in this study do not know who was enrolled in the courses that were photographed.

I am writing to inform you – utilizing a blind email list – that you were enrolled in one of the courses for which attendance patterns were analyzed. Note: Images for the study were captured only of the physical classroom seats being photographed. 

I have given a link to my statements to the FAS faculty in response to a question posed by Professor Harry Lewis to describe the purpose of the study and the reasoning behind the methods. 

Ultimately, we hope that this and other research to understand student behavior will help to improve teaching and learning.

If you have any specific questions or concerns about the study, I would be happy to speak with you. Please make arrangements through my Executive Assistant, Molly Groome molly_groome@harvard.edu.

Thanks.

Peter Bol
Vice Provost for Advances in Learning
Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The full prepared Remarks from Professor Peter Bol for the November 4 Meeting of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences are available online.

http://vpal.harvard.edu/news/notes-vice-provost-attendance-study