A major element that enormously affects education is class attendance. Attendance is a crucial factor that affects the learning of students all over the world, and plays an extensive role in every student’s scheme. However, when it comes to the conception of enforcing attendance as a mandatory grading mechanism or discretionary option, the issue remains paradoxical. The six articles of this paper discuss the concept of attendance among high school students and the factors affecting it (Romer, 1993; Guleker & Keci, 2014), in addition to whether it is the only predictor to success (Borland & Howsen, 1998; Gump, 2005), as well as the controversial concept of mandating graded attendance policies or leaving it optional (Chenneville & Jordan, 2008; Marburger, 2006). Mandating attendance policies is the most controllable factor or solution to optimizing attendance rates (Gump, 2005) and thus aiding students to a better performance placing on them on the road to success. Through this paper, this hypothesis will be studied.
In their two articles, Romer (1993) and Guleker & Keci (2014) study the factors affecting student attendance, and consequently performance. The focus of the first study was on the factors affecting students’ performance, and the actions that should be taken to redeem the situation. This study was based on the factors affecting attendance of the participants undergraduate economics students such as the size of the course, whereby the bigger the class, the higher the rate of absences. Moreover the type of the course, where students attend mathematical courses more than core course. Furthermore the quality of teaching, since students attend courses with higher quality of information more than ones with lower quality of information. In addition to the faculty members teaching the course, whereby students attend courses managed by regular faculty members more than ones taught by other professors. This same study asserts that mandatory attendance is very important, and should be enforced (Romer, 1993). However, there was a generalization in this study because the results which were based on a small limited sample group – the undergraduate Economics students was generalized on all the students in the world. The latter study, Guleker & Keci, showed that there is a direct relationship between attendance and performance.
A study was carried out then, to discover their reasons behind the non-appearance of the participants which were the undergraduate Civil engineering students in a private university in Tirana. Using the data of the three years presented by the same professors in two different semesters in Tirana University, by signing attendance sheets whereby the university takes a compulsory attendance policy inducing that you cannot miss more than half of the classes to sit for the final examination. Students over 85% had good attendance, 70 and 85% had acceptable attendance, whereby studies below 70% had poor attendance. Nevertheless, there was a slight difference in the percentages of absences in the favor of the students enrolled in the Spring semester over the ones during the Fall which lacked the diversity of cases where it included only two courses. Furthermore, it involves a methodological error by only using two courses from a private University and applying them to all Universities, whereby more studies should have been done on public Universities to see if they suffer the same issues.
Other studies discussed whether attendance is the only predictor to success (Bowland & Howsen; Gump, 2005). First, (Bowland & Howsen) questions whether attendance policy is the only predictor to student performance. This article is a refutation response to Lamdin’s belief that attendance is the only necessary predictor to success. Borland & Howsen believe that there are other factors that affect performance of the participants, which were high school students. These factors included: innate ability (which is directly proportional to students’ performance), market competition (which is a promoter to student competition, and this is also proportional to performances), teacher to pupil ratios, and expenditure per student. According to Bowland and Howsen, the results from this study indicate that attendance is not the only variable affecting performance.
On the other hand, the study limited these results by taking into consideration only a district and generalizing it on all students in the United States. The second study, Gump (2005) addressed the same topic, and agreed that attendance is not the only factor affecting success. The Gump Study, was based on analyzing the final grades and attendance percentages of the three hundred students in twelve sections of a Japanese culture class which were participants. Gump concluded that students who attended more classes will likely have higher grades. However attendance will not be the only factor. Furthermore, we should note that the components of the course were not identical through the four semesters, only weekly arguments were reflected. The factors under study could have been experimented more in details, and other questions could be asked such as: the effects of extra points on attendance percentages, the raise in percentage or drop effect, in addition to the students’ impression about his mentor and its effect on attendance.
In the light of the idea of attendance, certain students carried the discussion on whether implementing an obligatory attendance will have an effect on course attendance, and consequently on performance [Channersville & Jordan (2008), Marburger (2006)]. Channersville & Jordan (2008) studied how a graded attendance policy will have an effect on course attendance, and the opinion of university students towards attendance policies. In fact, Channersville & Jordan (2008) carried out an experiment asking the participants which were undergraduate psychology students to fill out surveys about their opinion. This was done by random to experimental and control groups which were assigned courses randomly too.
The results point that students do not desire attendance policies to exist although they wanted rewards for making efforts to attend. This was a conflicting ideology which the authors discovered among participants. Moreover, the authors agree that graded attendance policies will help to increase students attendance and performance. But the fact that this study was only made on psychology undergraduate students limits the ability to conclude its findings as general information about mandatory attendance worldwide. Furthermore, students were tracked to sign attendance roll sheets making the students in the control group to assume it will be part of their grades whereas these students could have attended more if the attendance was taken voluntarily. This article also omitted to mention some factors which might also prevent students from attending classes. For example: hurricane, epileptic power supply and many amongst others. In addition to the under-presentation of males which limits having full generalization since males are half of the society. On the other hand, Marburger (2006) studies the effect of not attending classes. For his research, Marburger (2006) launches a controlled experiment held on undergraduate Economics students to detect whether enforcing a mandatory attendance policy improves learning.
He divides the experiment into two group: an experimental group with a graded attendance policy (policy class) and a controlled group with no attendance policy (non-policy class). The two groups were taught by the same Professor at the same time during two different Fall semesters. The results deduced that obligatory attendance highly influence attendance and thus, performance, encouraging it to be enforced. Moreover, the author discovered more variables affecting attendance such as number of credits taken by a student, the location of the student’s residence, in addition to the age and control maturity and dedication. However, this study commits a fallacy of general assumption by limiting his experience to a limited sample group of two classes of undergraduate Economics students, and generalized it on all students as though they were the standard by which every other student in the world could be measured.
It has been found that enforcing an attendance policy can either be a motivator for students attendance to classes, and also enhance performance or be a disadvantage because it reduces students capabilities or intellectual output [Bowland, M.V & Howsen (1998); Guleker R., Keci I. (2014); Channersville & Jordan (2008); Gump (2005); Romer (1993)]. Yet, all these articles discussing this issue of attendance limited it to factors varying from course size, course type, quality of instruction, and faculty members. These variables further included average number of hours at a job, location of residence, age, and type of control maturity.
The experiments and surveys executed to determine the response of students towards mandatory attendance policies also included the feedback on the impact of implementing mandatory attendance policies on students attendance rates. From the above submissions, it is clear that students should not be given the discretion of attending classes since many of them are unaware of what benefits them and what does not. It ordinarily seems unwise for most of them not to attend the classes they are actually paying for. Accordingly, mandatory graded attendance policies should be enforced at all educational institutions to aid all students into better attendance rates, and subsequently, an improved performance. This policy will place them on the right track towards a future of prosperity. It will also equip them with all the essential tools needed in education to make them ready to face any obstacle. To this end, further research that deals with specific explanations on how mandatory attendance may be used as a booster towards better attendance as well as performance is required.
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