Student Attendance In Schools

Student attendance in colleges is still till this day a highly-debated subject by many, and is an important issue in today’s education. For the past decade, a high number of researchers have been studying the relationship between students’ absenteeism (or attendance) and performance. Generally, the most common result was attendance does matter for academic performance (Romer, 1993; Marburger, 2006). Lectures should be attended because they are the best mean of instruction for undergraduate courses (Romer, 1993). This evidence has led to increase student attendance and even consider making attendance mandatory in some undergraduate courses. However, other research have showed that there’s variables other than attendance alone affecting performance

In the first article, Romer (1993) provided evidence on absenteeism that showed a positive correlation between attendance and performance in undergraduate courses at three major universities, he found that the relationship was of a causal nature. Romer (1993) followed up with the number of students attending each course through the semester and found the classes that had higher attendance rates, to conclude that attendance should be mandatory because of its high impact on grade performance; his study was limited because he studied only economic courses. More recently, Marburger (2006) added to his 2001 analysis of the relationship between attendance and performance. Marburger (2006) reaches similar results to his previous research, he evaluated the effect of missing class on examinations in two classes (policy and no-policy), and noted that absence of enforced attendance policy is leading to absenteeism increase daily. Marburger (2006) concluded an inverse relationship between absenteeism and grades where it kept increasing in the no policy class and stayed constant in the policy class. Both articles found that classes with mandatory attendance performed better because students will not miss out on material and content from the course and perform better on exams. Then, Romer (1993) and Marburger (2006) suggest that measurements should be taken into consideration to

In this paper was discussed different opinions about attendance policies, two articles relating performance and attendance directly in a cause effect relationship. (Romer, 1993; Marburger, 2006). Other articles of the debated subject showed more of a correlation relationship between attendance and performance with stating variables affecting the relationship (Borland and Howsen, 1998; Gump, 2005; Chenneville and Jordan, 2003, Guleker and Keci, 2014). However, the articles showed limitations when Romer (1993) and Marburger (2006) agreed on mandatory attendance, they were missing same variables that may affect performance their samples were too small, not enough students and colleges, they overgeneralized. Marburger (2006) did not give students exact exams when testing them. The other authors also had their limitations besides the size of the sample and the need of more proper evidence, Chenneville and Jordan (2008) did their research on psychology students only, hence, their research may not be applicable on other students, they also left out some environmental problems related to bad weather which led to a condensed semester and that played a role on the ratio of absences registered. Gump (2005 wasn’t uniform with the syllabi, lectures and final grade element in his experiment which corrupted the ratio zero. Guleker and keci (2014) could have used their questionnaires in a more effective way, by asking students for reasons why