If you have included attendance and/or participation as part of your course’s evaluation criteria, you may have questions about how to add them to your gradebook, especially if you teach via Zoom or on campus.

Fortunately, grading attendance is relatively straightforward because Canvas provides the Roll Call Attendance tool, which creates an attendance register in your course. You can use it to record weekly attendance, and it will calculate an overall attendance grade for students for you based on the data you enter. Click the Attendance tab below to learn more about how this feature works.

On the other hand, grading class participation is one of the most difficult aspects of student evaluation. It can be approached in many different ways, but some require considerable recordkeeping work or have the potential to disadvantage certain types of students (introverts, English language learners, differently abled students). Click the Participation tab below to browse some approaches to grading participation that have worked for other instructors.

Attendance
Participation

Attendance

Canvas’s Attendance feature creates an attendance register in your course that you can use to track whether students are present, absent, late, or excused for each class session.

Be aware that the Attendance feature is not enabled in Canvas by default because it creates a column in your course’s gradebook that can be difficult to remove. After reviewing this information, if you decide you want to use the Attendance feature, send an email to learningsupport@uclaextension.edu to request to have it added to your course.

Attendance Register

Once the Attendance feature is added to your course, it appears as an “Attendance” link in your course’s navigation menu. Clicking this link will open the "Roll Call" page, which is your course’s attendance register. (Note that only you, not your students, can see the attendance register.)

Roll Call Attendance Assignment

After you record attendance for the first time, Canvas automatically creates an assignment called “Roll Call Attendance" in the Assignments area of your course, so a column for it automatically appears in your course’s gradebook. Roll Call Attendance scores will be visible to both you and your students in the Grades area of your course.

By default, the Roll Call Attendance assignment is worth 100 points, and students earn points based on the status you record in the attendance register for each class session:

present and on time ( 100%)
not present (0%)
late (80%)
excused absence (not counted)

If you want to change the value of the Roll Call Attendance assignment, you can edit it and adjust its points value, but be aware that you must change it before you begin recording attendance in your register. Also, to avoid calculation errors, do not delete, rename or unpublish the Roll Call Attendance assignment.

To learn more even about how Canvas’s Attendance feature works, review this Canvas Community guide: What is the Roll Call Attendance tool?

Participation

How to give students credit for in-class participation will vary depending on your teaching style, how much time you want to spend on tracking and recording it, and how much value you want to place on it as an evaluation criterion.

Manual Tracking

This option works well if all students will have an opportunity to participate during your class sessions.

Some instructors opt to stick with the tried-and-true “crib sheet” method for tracking in-class participation. It requires you to create a tracking spreadsheet with rows listing each student’s name and columns for each class session. Then, you will note whether each student participated during each class session.

Ways in which your students could demonstrate participation include:

delivering individual or small-group presentations
providing a critique or analysis of another student’s presentation
answering questions or contributing to an open discussion
completing an individual in-class exercise
collaborating with other students on an in-class group exercise
writing a short reflection response at the end of your class session

If you opt to go this route, in addition to setting up a spreadsheet, you will need to create a “no submission” assignment in your course, which will add a column in your gradebook where you can manually enter students’ participation grades. Some instructors opt to update students’ participation grades after each class session, while others wait to post cumulative grades at midterm and/or the end of the term.

Self-Tracking

This option works well if your students will be doing a lot of small-group work during class time and/or if you want students to have primary responsibility over their participation.

If you plan to have students break out into small groups during your class sessions, you may find it challenging to assess who is actively participating. At the same time, you may like having students track their own participation so that they are more aware of their level of contribution during class sessions. A good way to facilitate either (or both) of these approaches is to have students self-track their own participation.

To set-up self-tracking, you will start by creating a participation log template that you will provide to your students. (A Word document or Google Doc would work well.) Also, you may want to think through what will count as participation in your class and share a list with your students so they have guidelines for what they can include in their participation log.

Each student will record their contributions during class sessions in their participation log, then at midterm and the end of class (or more frequently depending on how much time you want to dedicate to grading participation), they will upload it to a Canvas assignment so you can grade it.

Polling & Quizzing

This option works well if you want your entire class to participate together in the same activity.

Polls and quizzes are a useful way to allow all students to participate in a class activity without using up a lot of class time. They also enable you to check in on how students are doing or gauge whether they understand concepts you are covering during your class session.

If your class meets via Zoom, you can simply use its built-in polling feature. Zoom will provide you with a poll report after every meeting that tracks who responded to all of the poll questions you launched during your meeting.

For all courses, you can take periodic breaks during which students log into Canvas to answer a short quiz or survey. You can set availability restrictions so that students can only access your quiz or survey while your class meets.

NOTE: Many other polling and quizzing applications offer free versions, like PollEverywhere and Kahoot!, but they will not report individual user participation, so they are not good options for tracking in-class participation. (However, they can still be very effective at increasing student engagement during class time.)

End-of-Class Reflection

This option works well if all students may not have an opportunity to consistently participate during your class sessions or you want to make sure everyone has a voice.

If your class time will be structured so that not all students will have an opportunity to contribute during every class session, or if you would like to make sure students have a chance to express themselves—even if they are anxious about speaking up during class, stronger writers than speakers, or need time to gather their thoughts—consider assigning a short reflection assignment at the end of every class.

You can facilitate this reflection in a couple of different ways:

If your class meets on campus, you could hand out index cards or have students pull out a sheet of paper and write down their reflection during the last 10 minutes of your class time. This will require you to create a series of “on paper” assignments in your Canvas course.
If you meet on Zoom, you do not want to give up in-person class time, and/or you do not want to deal with a lot of paper, you could create a discussion in your Canvas course where students can post their reflections after each class session. This will require you to create a series of discussions in Canvas, but we provide a Weekly Reflection discussion template to give you a head start.

What students write for their reflection could also vary. You could present them with the week’s learning objectives and ask them to assess whether they feel like they have mastered them. You could ask students to list their top takeaways from the class session, questions they have, or something they would like to learn more about. Either of these approaches has the added benefit of identifying for you whether students understood the main points you planned to get across during your class session.