Engaging students through partnership to develop and evaluate a summative professional standards grade: an inadvertent three-year investigation into university student attendance

This three-year action research project explored the development, implementation, and evaluation of a student-staff negotiated ‘Professional Standards’ (PS) mark in sport-related undergraduate modules. The PS mark was embedded into the module’s summative assessment grade, co-designed with students to reflect behaviours they deemed professionally important, mainly attendance, preparation, and contribution. Academic year one (AY1) ran as a pilot with one module, academic year two (AY2) acted as a replication study and introduced a new larger module to evaluate scalability; and the PS mark was removed in academic year three (AY3). Findings showed greater class attendance in modules with a PS mark compared to comparator modules without it, and this observation was repeatable and scalable. When the PS mark was removed in AY3, attendance matched comparator modules, reinforcing its impact. In the paper, we discuss the merits and criticisms of attendance emerging as a summative outcome measure in the context of higher education pedagogy and different forms of student engagement.