Moving beyond check-the-box attendance: a token-based approach to encouraging meaningful UTA session participation

Undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) can provide valuable peer-supported learning opportunities in large physiology courses, but encouraging students to use these resources meaningfully can be challenging. In a large flipped undergraduate human physiology course, students were initially required to attend UTA-led review sessions for a small number of course points. Although this attendance-point system increased session use, it also produced unintended consequences. Near the end of course units and especially near the end of the semester, attendance often increased sharply as students attended primarily to earn points rather than to engage with physiology content. These crowded sessions were difficult for UTAs to manage and reduced the value of the sessions for students seeking help. To address this problem, direct attendance points were replaced with a future-oriented token system. Students earned tokens by actively participating in two UTA-led review sessions, and tokens could be used only on future coursework, such as making up selected missed assignments or revising missed exam questions. This article describes the rationale, design, implementation, and lessons learned from this token system. Although the change was not implemented as a formal education research study, instructor and UTA observations suggest that the token system may have reduced check-the-box attendance and better aligned the incentive with the intended purpose of the sessions: proactive, collaborative engagement with physiology content. This model may be useful for instructors seeking to encourage help seeking without directly awarding points for attendance.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This article describes a future-oriented token system used to encourage meaningful participation in undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA)-led review sessions in a large undergraduate physiology course. Rather than awarding points for attendance, students earned limited-use tokens by actively participating in two sessions. The approach shifted the incentive away from check-the-box attendance and toward proactive help seeking, repeated engagement, and collaborative learning.