Additional Evidence on the Effect of Class Attendance on Academic Performance

Abstract

Professors often claim that students who attend their classes regularly receive better grades and learn more than those who do not. Romer (Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 1993), Launius (College Student Journal 31, 1997), Van Blerkom (Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 126, 1992), and Park and Kerr (Journal of Economic Education 21, 1999) find evidence in support of this hypothesis. However, many studies on class attendance conducted by economists focus on the principles of economics courses in which students are drawn from a narrow range of majors like accounting, business, and economics. In contrast, this study analyzes how class attendance affects academic performance in the introductory economics course that all students at Shepherd University must complete. The students enrolled in this course represent a very diverse group with various academic skills and interests and a broad range of majors including the arts, humanities, sciences, and applied fields like nursing. Using a uniquely diverse sample of students from a one-semester introductory economics course, we show that attendance has a very large and statistically significant effect on academic performance even after factoring out the motivation component.We test the hypothesis that class attendance has a positive effect on academic performance. The model to be estimated can be expressed as a general production function that relates output in terms of academic performance to three key inputs such as ability, attendance, and motivation. All three independent variables are hypothesized to be Atl Econ J (2008) 36:493–494 DOI 10.1007/s11293-008-9142-x