I'm very interested in this topic and haven't found much policy research either.
I do have a slide show titled "A Dozen Ideas about First-Year Assessment" by Bradley Cox and Randy Swing that describes the articles below. http://www.slideserve.com/Pat_Xavi/a-dozen-ideas-about-first-year-assessment
Anderson, C. (2004). Freshman absence-based intervention at the University of Mississippi. In R. Swing (Ed.), Proving and improving, Volume II: Tools and techniques for assessing the first college year (monograph no. 37) (pp. 19 -21). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.
Experimental design. Treatment group were contacted by a graduate student if they missed 2 classes per 8 weeks. Their grades improved significantly compared to the control group. In a second year of the study, the intervention was expanded campus wide, and attendance contacts were made by residence hall advisors. The effect was still good but not as strong.
Porter, S. R., & Umbach, P. D. We can't get there in time: Assessing the time between classes and classroom disruptions. Planning in Higher Education, 32(2), 35-40.
Assessed the number of times students "cut" classes and their reasons. I don't think there are any interventions in this article but it may provide useful information for policy.
I look forward to hearing what other research is out there.
Rachelle
Rachelle Thibodeau, Ph.D.
Coordinator, Academic Support Programs
Centre for Initiatives in Education
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-----Original Message-----
From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Foster, Ed
Sent: April-22-15 12:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Impact of student attendance policies
Dear all
I hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd try to find some crowdsourced wisdom
There are a number of papers that very clearly find a correlation between attendance and academic success. However the studies they describe tend to show that over time broadly good attenders do well, those with poor attendance less so.
I've only found one paper that shows any impact on attendance caused by policy - an American paper where the researchers temporarily took away compulsory attendance rules (Marburger, 2001, Absenteeism and Undergraduate Exam Performance, Journal of Economics Education, 37, 2, p99) and saw attendance decline.
Does anyone have evidence of how any institutional intervention leads to changes in attendance patterns.
* For example, a study showing that the introduction of 10% of marks in a module offered for good attendance. Did the implementation change anything?
* Or for institutions with changed policies, for example teams more actively following up low attendance, changing overall attendance?
I think that there are good reasons for attendance monitoring other than changing behaviour, but implicit in a lot of policies is that monitoring and intervening will actually change student behaviour and there doesn't appear to be much evidence to support this.
Hopefully this is a question of interest to others too.
Cheers
Ed
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